Contemporary Period 1945 to the Present

Transcription

Contemporary Period
1945 to the Present
674 • The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
674
Contemporary Period: 1945 to the Present • 675
Orthodoxy and Resistance:
Cold War Culture and Its Discontents
The Beat Movement
New Communities, New Identities, New
Energies
Vietnam Conflict
Postmodernity and Difference: Promises and
Threats
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator explains the method
behind his circular narrative by declaring that “the end is in the beginning,”
and in a way the three sections on contemporary literature bring us back to
issues raised by the texts about the origins of America that open The Heath
Anthology. The introduction to the section on “Native American Oral
Literatures” suggests that the class consider the “creation stories” that
students bring with them in order to come to some sense of that cultural
construct we call “America.” Such a discussion questions how such stories
are produced, by what groups of people, and for what purposes. Throughout
the section introductions, this approach is described as an analysis of
“cultural rhetoric”—the consideration of texts not as static artifacts with selfcontained meanings but as strategic examples of what Jane Tompkins calls
“cultural work”—the products of dynamic processes of cultural
confrontation, negotiation, assimilation, and transformation. These processes
include the printing and dispersal of these texts in The Heath Anthology, the
revision of this anthology from edition to edition, the assignment of these
texts in college classes, and the particular reading experiences of the students
in the class taken as both individuals and as members of various
communities. Such an approach demonstrates as well that since the study of
the past involves the active creation of knowledge on the part of students and
teachers, history becomes an active part of the present.
The study of recent culture reverses this equation as a part of the same
pedagogical approach by regarding the present as part of history. The
historical debates over the so-called “canon” of American literature can be
illustrated for students by having them define a contemporary canon by
themselves, an especially appropriate activity at the start of a new century.
To do this, the class will have to consider what is meant by contemporary
culture, how we define what is central, what is marginal, why we might want
to undertake such definitions, and what the consequences of different
definitions might be. The multiple editions anthology itself (as well as the
class syllabus) can then be regarded as just one example of canon-building,
complete with explanations and justifications of the choices made.
With regard to the section on contemporary literature in particular,
discussion can center on the classification system used to organize these
texts. If copies of the earlier editions of The Heath Anthology are handy, the
class can compare how categories have been revised from one edition to the
next and why. For example, both the second and third editions can be seen as
grouping contemporary texts by decades—the fifties, the sixties (and the
extension of the sixties into the seventies), and the eighties/nineties—under
rubrics that highlight a particular historical interpretation of each decade:
“Orthodoxy and Resistance: Cold War Culture and Its Discontents” (a subtle
but significant revision of “The Cold War: Orthodoxy and Resistance” from
the second edition); “New Communities, New Identities, New Energies”;
“Postmodernity and Difference: Promises and Threats.” From another
perspective, however, these titles are contemporaneous, not chronological—
Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike from “Orthodoxy and Resistance” are
primarily writers of the last three decades; Hisaye Yamamoto and Saul
Bellow, while included in “New Communities, New Identities, New
Energies,” are writers of the forties and fifties as well. All of the above
suggests the complexity of cultural forces at work in contemporary society:
the tension and sometimes dialectic between culture and counterculture
(“Orthodoxy and Resistance”); the (re)emergence of multicultural literature
following the liberation movements of the sixties (“New Communities, New
Identities, New Energies”); the self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of
contemporary literature, including contemporary multicultural and countercultural literature (“Postmodernity and Difference: Promises and Threats”).
The complexity of these issues also foregrounds the fact that all anthologies
of literature, including The Heath Anthology, are not just chronicles of
cultural change but active participants in that change.
Such an analysis naturally suggests inviting the class to construct their
own textbook—their own canons—and to engage in the same operation of
historicizing the present and near-present past by examining the associations
students have in conjunction with terms like “the fifties,” “the sixties,” “the
seventies,” “the eighties,” and now “the nineties.” Where do these
associations come from? How are they perpetuated through the mass media
and popular culture and for what ends? Political? Commercial? What other
categories and groupings could we use to organize, read, and interpret the
texts in this section? “Women Writers”? “The African-American Tradition”?
“Poetic Experimentation”? This kind of pedagogical approach emphasizes
multiculturalism as an activity, not an inert state of being, an activity that
reads texts—all texts, not just texts by “ethnic” writers (as if it were possible
for there to be “nonethnic” writers)—as complex, hybrid forms of discourse.
In a similar way, Gloria Anzaldúa developed the concept of “mestiza
consciousness” primarily as a way of describing how her own complex
identity as a multilingual, multinational lesbian Chicana writer taught her to
“cope by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity” by learning how to “juggle cultures.” She also
implies, however, that such an experience is typical rather than
exceptional, and that we are all to a greater or lesser extent
juggling cultures as well, the difference being not between the
pure and the mixed in terms of cultural identity, but between
the conscious recognition of the complicated interrelationship
of diverse cultural backgrounds and a kind of willful
innocence/ignorance of this diversity:
The struggle is inner: Chicano, indo, American Indian,
Mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power,
working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches
resemble the borderlands and are populated by the same
people. The struggle has always been inner, and is
played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our
situation must come before inner changes, which in turn
come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the
“real” world unless it first happens in the images in our
heads. (87)
Anzaldúa’s reference to the outer terrains—the rhetorical space where
these internal issues of cultural definition, resistance, and transformation are
played out—serves well as a pedagogical coda to this instructor’s guide,
reminding us that the point of cultural contestation or consensus, the site of
struggle and mastery, doesn’t lie between the covers of any particular
anthology, but takes place in what Louise Rosenblatt called the transaction
between reader and text, a transaction that includes both the immediate
historical context of the reader as well as that of the text. Whatever the
particular selections made for any given class syllabus, the real focus of the
class is that transaction—the “images in our heads” that constitute the
internal terrain of American literature.
Bibliography
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Orthodoxy and Resistance:
Cold War Culture and Its
Discontents
Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
Contributing Editor: Robert A. Martin
Classroom Issues and Strategies
Written and first produced for the 1953 drama season in New York, The
Crucible continues to interest students for its witchcraft theme and setting in
Salem, and for its more recent political association as a historical parable
against the dangers of McCarthyism. While the latter issue has generally
faded in the public mind, it was very much the issue when the play opened.
The several layers of meaning—historical (witchcraft), political (McCarthyism and the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee), and
the ever-present approach to the play as stagecraft and theater—allow an
instructor to open the play to a class probably not knowledgeable about any
of the layers. I have found that such a class is quickly taken up to the level of
the play. Miller has added a running commentary on the issues and
personalities of Salem. It is important to point out that there is no character
in the play “who did not play a similar—and in some cases exactly the
same—role in history” (Arthur Miller in his “Note” on the historical
accuracy of The Crucible).
The witch-hunt that occurred in Salem in 1692 resulted from a complex
society at a turning point when the power of the Massachusetts theocracy
was weakening. Reverend Parris was more representative of absolute church
authority than Miller makes him out. Once the issues came into the open, he
found that the whole “devilish” conspiracy needed wiser and more learned
minds to uncover it, even if he was absolutely convinced of the reality of
witchcraft. I usually begin a class by stating that at Salem on Gallows Hill in
the spring of 1692, nineteen men and women were hanged; one man, Giles
Corey, was pressed to death for standing mute; and two dogs were also
hanged for witchcraft. The classroom then becomes a different place; the
question of witchcraft, or how could those people have believed in it, brings
out some interesting and fruitful ideas, discussions, viewpoints. Discussion
of the play, however, should identify the McCarthyism parallels in a way
that students can understand. Miller has said that the theme of the play is
“the handing over of conscience to the state.” The question is not entirely a
remote one, as almost any major newspaper or television exposé can make
the issue clear to today’s students.
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal
Issues
Central to this play, in addition to Miller’s theme stated above, is one of
illusion versus reality. In a society that held a doctrinal belief in the power
and reality of the devil to “overthrow God’s kingdom,” the powers of
persuasion to see “specters” where there were none resulted in mass hysteria.
When John Proctor, a born skeptic, challenges the illusion, he is
subsequently brought down by the reality of his adultery. As the witch-hunt
spread to eventually cause the arrest of prominent citizens, some form of
common sense prevailed and the girls were silenced. The Salem hysteria has
been investigated and researched widely, and many excellent sources are
available. One recent theory proposed that the whole business was the result
of ergot poisoning, a bacteria that produces hallucinations if wheat is stored
for too long and is allowed to ferment. This, of course, was the theory of a
modern-day scientist who also happened to be a graduate student. It was a
neat and “scientific” solution to a very old question. Unfortunately, the
whole theory collapsed when expert senior biologists looked at the idea
closer and declared it bad science. Miller, possibly as a result of the play,
was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 on
the pretense of issuing him a passport. He was convicted of contempt of
Congress for refusing to answer questions about the communistic
connections of others. The decision was later reversed. Miller had in effect
been convicted on the same principle as John Proctor—guilt by
association—and like Proctor he refused to name others.
Original Audience
In the early 1950s there was something resembling a cohesive audience for
serious plays. That audience was both shocked and fearful that the theme and
subject of the play would unleash still further inquiries by the forces of
McCarthyism. Reviewers, reflecting the mood of the audience, had several
reactions. Some praised the acting, some thought it was a play without
contemporary parallels, and others avoided the play’s obvious point
altogether. The best way to understand the response by critics is to read their
reviews in the 1953 volume of New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews.
Bibliography
Miller has written at length on the play and on the context of the time. The
following are easily available sources I have my students use in their
research. The first and probably most important are Miller’s comments in
volume one of Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (Viking, 1957), pp. 38–48.
All of Miller’s essays are reprinted in my The Theater Essays of Arthur
Miller (Viking, 1978), including several comments made over the next
several decades. An early work on The Crucible was (at the time) nicely
complete and informative for its comprehensive critical collection of essays
on the play, the history behind it, and the context: The Crucible: Text and
Criticism (Penguin, 1977, first published by Viking in 1971), ed. Gerald
Weales. John H. Ferres edited a useful collection of essays on the play titled
Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Crucible: A Collection of Critical
Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1972). Also of interest for its judicious selection of
essays and an interview with Miller in 1979 in which many references and
comments on The Crucible occur is Critical Essays on Arthur Miller (G. K.
Hall, 1979), ed. James J. Martine. Somewhat of broader scope, but
nevertheless useful for its international Miller bibliography by Charles A.
Carpenter and a fine essay by Walter Meserve on The Crucible is Arthur
Miller: New Perspectives (Prentice-Hall, 1982), ed. Robert A. Martin. My
essay, “Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Background and Sources,” has proven
of use to many students and scholars who seek to learn some of the
connections between the play and Salem in 1692, and has been reprinted
numerous times, most recently in Essays on Modern American Drama
(University of Toronto Press, 1987), ed. Dorothy Parker, and in Martine’s
Critical Essays noted above. I recommend that my students read selectively
in Conversations with Arthur Miller (University of Mississippi Press, 1987),
ed. Matthew C. Roudane. There are fifty-two page references listed in the
index for The Crucible. Miller’s comments in conversations and interviews
are frequently more enlightening than any other playwright in our history
because he is articulate as well as theoretically sophisticated. Finally, a more
recent account is The Crucible: Politics, Property, and Pretense (New York:
Twayne Masterworks Series, 1993), by James J. Martine, which is one of the
most complete and comprehensive studies of The Crucible to date. Martine
is a well-known Miller scholar and his critical judgment is astute.
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)
Contributing Editor: Thomas P. Adler
Students may tend to respond to the heroines, especially in Williams’s
earlier plays up through the end of the 1940s, differently from what he
intended because their value system is not the same. His sensitive, poetic
misfits who escape from reality into a world of illusion/art are likely to seem
too remote, too soft. The very things that Williams values about them—their
grace, their gentility—nowadays may appear dispensable adjuncts of life in
an age when competition and aggressiveness are valorized among both
sexes. So students need to be sensitized to Williams’s romantic ideals and to
what he sees as the civilizing, humanizing virtues.
It helps to place Williams in context as a southern dramatist, and also as
one who propounds the feminizing of American culture as a counter to a
society built on masculine ideals of strength and power. Students also need
to understand that Williams is a “poetic” realist, not simply in his use of a
lyrical rhetoric but in his handling of imagery, both verbal and visual. If they
attend carefully to his command of visual stage symbolism, they can
oftentimes discover the necessary clues about Williams’s attitude toward his
characters.
Any discussion of “Portrait of a Madonna” will necessarily focus upon
Williams’s characterization of his sexually frustrated and neurotic heroine,
whose upbringing in a succession of southern rectories, under the nay-saying
and guilt-inducing “shadow” of the church and of the cross, has left her
totally unprepared for life and prey to crazed delusions. Miss Collins
becomes almost the archetypal unmarried daughter, restricted by the
responsibility of caring for an aged mother, sensing the social pressure to be
sexual and yet denied any morally sanctioned expression of these feelings,
finally forced into madness as a result of unrealistic expectations. The image
of the Madonna and Child becomes central to an understanding of the play:
the Virgin and Mother whom Lucretia costumed for the Sunday School
Christmas pageant; the children she visits twice a year on religious holidays
with her scrapbooks of Campbell soup kids; Richard’s many children; the
fabricated “child” to be born of a woman virginal in body and heart, defiled
only in her dreams.
Brief though it is, Williams’s play is amenable to many critical approaches
other than the psychological and feminist. A formalist approach might
examine the way in which Williams structures his play—as he later will
Streetcar—around a series of dichotomies: past/present; memory/fact;
gentility/brutality; shadow/light; sanity/insanity; freedom/repression; virginal/defiled; harmless illusion/harmful delusion. A literary-historical
approach could place the work within the tradition of southern gothicism,
while a sociocultural framework could explore the way in which the myth of
southern chivalry curtails Lucretia’s independence, as well as the way in
which utilitarian technology threatens the artistic sensibility (elevator cage as
machine played off against the music on the gramophone). A generic
approach might consider the possibilities for seeing the play as a tragedy,
while a biographical approach might trace the relationship between Lucretia
and Williams’s own schizophrenic sister Rose. For some considerations of
various new theoretical approaches in literary criticism together with
examples of their application to a dramatic text by Williams, you might
consult Confronting Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”:
Essays in Cultural Pluralism, edited by Philip C. Kolin (Westport:
Greenwood, 1993).
Issues
Central thematic issues include the question of illusion and reality, the
relationship between madness and art, and the role of the artist in society, as
well as the necessity to respond compassionately and nonjudgmentally to the
needs of God’s sensitive yet weak creatures who are battered and
misunderstood. Historically, Williams’s relation to the myth of the cavalier
South should be explored. Finally, Williams’s close identification with his
heroines needs to be seen in light of his relationship with his schizophrenic
sister Rose, as he admits in his Memoirs, the most intensely emotional
attachment in his personal life.
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions
Although “Portrait” itself is essentially a realistic, albeit somewhat poetic,
play, Williams himself should be approached as an innovator of a new
“plastic” theater, a practitioner, along with Arthur Miller, of what some have
termed “a theatre of gauze.” To handle this aspect of Williams’s aesthetic,
the instructor might either read or reproduce as a handout the dramatist’s
Production Notes to Glass Menagerie, along with Tom’s opening narration
in that play, which really differentiates Williams’s practice—“truth in the
pleasant disguise of illusion”—from the strict realism—“illusion that has the
appearance of truth”—of others.
Original Audience
The choice of the one-act play form itself tells something about Williams’s
intended audience. Rather than aim at a commercial production, “Portrait”
seems more appropriate for an amateur (academic or civic) theater
presentation, where the interest will be largely on character and dialogue
rather than production values. Thus, it appears intended for a limited
audience of intense theatergoers. From the perspective of the dramatist, it
serves partly as a “study” for larger work(s), in the same way a painter might
do a series of studies before attempting a full canvas. And so, in a sense, the
artist too is his own audience.
Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections
Lucretia Collins bears comparison with other Williams heroines in “The
Lady of Larkspur Lotion,” The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire,
and Summer and Smoke. Students might also contrast the way Miss Collins
escapes from the sociocultural milieu that constricts her freedom with the
heroines’ responses in Susan Glaspell’s short play “Trifles” and William
Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.”
Questions for Reading, Discussion, and Writing
1.
2.
(a) Consider the dramatic function(s) of the minor characters, the
Porter and the Elevator Boy, in the play.
(b) Could “Portrait of a Madonna” have been expanded to a fulllength work? To accomplish that, what else might Williams
have dramatized? Would anything have been lost in the
transformation?
(a) The director of the original production of “Portrait” had Lucretia
exit clutching a doll. What, if anything, would justify such an
interpolation in Williams’s text, and what might be the impact
on the audience?
(b) Discuss the theater metaphor in “Portrait”: the minor characters
as onstage audience; the bedroom, scene of illusions, as stage;
Mr. Abrams as stage manager/director, etc.
(c) In what way does Williams’s characterization of Lucretia
Collins lead the audience to conclude that he considered her
story “tragic”?
Bibliography
Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown,
1995.
Pagan, Nicholas. Rethinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach
to Tennessee Williams. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
1993.
Rolin, Philip C., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and
Performance. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.
Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.
Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
Contributing Editor: Jennifer L. Randisi
Like many lyric novelists, Welty is easy to read. She therefore seems (to
many students) very simple. They like her work, generally, and don’t want to
ruin their enjoyment by having to analyze it.
I like to begin by looking at what makes Welty seem simple (her lovely
sentences, the homey metaphors, her “impulse to praise”). The difficulty
here is not a lack of accessibility, but rather that Welty seems too accessible,
too superficial. The challenge is to get students to read Welty seriously,
critically, analytically.
Welty has said that except what’s personal there’s so little to tell. I’d start
where she did: with the hearts of the characters she’s writing about— the
universal emotions they share with us. Why do we feel a certain way about
the story? The situation? The character? What is evoked? How is Welty able
to evoke a certain response from us? What values emerge? A strong sense of
values is something Welty shares with writers like William Faulkner,
Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, and Alice
Walker. These novelists believe in certain things and the communities
created in their fiction share both a value system and a sense of what words
like “love” and “compassion” mean.
As with most of the southern writers, Welty’s humor, her use of the
grotesque, and her dialogue are often initial difficulties for students, who
tend to take her too literally and thus miss the fun she’s having. Welty’s
books often work the way folk or fairy tales do; students aren’t used to this.
Issues
Major themes include the problem of balancing love and separateness (the
community and one’s sense of self ), the role and influence of family and the
land (“place”), and the possibilities of art (storytelling) to inform life. Welty
is also very concerned with resonances of classical mythology, legend, and
folktale, and with the intersection of history and romance.
Welty clearly owes something to fellow Mississippian William Faulkner,
and to the oral tradition of the South. She has a terrific ear, reproducing
cadences of dialect and giving much insight into her characters by allowing
her readers to hear them talk. Welty’s work also owes something to the
grotesque as developed in the American South.
Original Audience
Since Welty hasn’t been grouped with writers critical of the South (her
issues are neither political nor social in a broad sense), her work hasn’t been
read much differently over the years. She’s been criticized for not attacking
the South; that has never been her interest or her aim.
Any of the southerners writing in the twentieth century could be compared to
Welty in terms of voice, violence, attitude toward the land, feelings about
community, and ways of telling a story. William Faulkner, Flannery
O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy—even Alice Walker—
would be good to start with.
1.
2.
I like to start with what students see. I think study questions
(except for general questions relating to the elements of the
story—point of view, character, theme) direct their reading
toward what they think I want them to see rather than
allowing them to see what they see.
I am fond of the short paper (2–3 pages) and of the directed
journal. The former allows students to focus on a very specific
problem or concern; the latter allows students to carry issues
from one author to the next, or from one book to the next. I
like assigning a formal paper from one of the journal entries.
Bibliography
Welty’s essay “Place in Fiction” is very good. Welty’s book of photographs,
One Time, One Place, is a nice companion piece, as is her collection of
essays, The Eye of the Story. Peggy Prenshaw’s Conversations with Eudora
Welty has some helpful information, and I think her collection of essays
(Eudora Welty: Critical Essays) and John F. Desmond’s (A Still Moment:
Essays on the Art of Eudora Welty) are both worthwhile reading.
My chapter on Losing Battles (in A Tissue of Lies) is also worth reading.
Ann Petry (1908–1997)
Contributing Editor: Hilary Holladay
So much is going on in Petry’s novels and short stories that you may wonder
where to begin a classroom discussion. For a discussion of “The Witness,”
racial conflicts, power plays between men and women, and problems within
the community of Wheeling are all equally valid starting points. Petry rarely
dwells on one social problem, though students particularly sensitive to one
or another issue (racism, for instance) may not recognize the range of her
concerns on a first reading. Therefore, asking students to discuss the
connections between matters of race and gender in “The Witness” may help
them grasp this story. Once they see how entwined the social issues are in
“The Witness,” they will be well on their way to understanding the scope of
Petry’s vision.
Issues
Prejudice is a central concern in Petry’s writing. In almost all of her works,
complex relationships develop among individuals prejudiced against each
other for reasons of race or gender. But her fiction contains few characters
who are solely victim or solely oppressors. Never one to make snap
judgments, she imbues even her most objectionable characters with
humanity. The would-be rapist Boots Smith in The Street, for example, has
been a victim of racial prejudice. While Petry does not excuse his behavior,
she does acknowledge the pathos of his life. Likewise, in “The Witness,” she
provides the delinquent boys with a social context: They are intelligent
young men, stifled by both church and school, who have no positive outlet
for their myriad frustrations.
In addition to exploring the intersections of racism and sexism, Petry
chronicles the ways in which people chase after the American dream only to
find that it is illusory. Petry’s characters typically experience a profound
disillusionment in their quests for success and/or peace of mind. This
disillusionment drives them toward a drastic act that has significant
implications for the whole community as well as the individual protagonist.
This is true of “The Witness” as well as of Petry’s novels.
In their emphasis on troubled communities and individual journeys
toward freedom, Petry’s works contain echoes of nineteenth-century slave
narratives. The Street’s Lutie Johnson is a prime example of an oppressed
character whose life devolves into a series of desperate escapes. The endings
of Petry’s works, however, depart from those of prototypical slave
narratives: neither Lutie Johnson nor Charles Woodruff achieves a
meaningful victory merely by escaping an intolerable situation.
Although Petry’s writing is clear and simply stated (reflecting her
journalistic background), her frequently discursive style finds its full power
in novels and long stories. Since her fiction focuses on relationships and
communities, she often uses multiple points of view, flashbacks, and other
devices that enable her to portray whole towns as well as individuals.
Throughout her career, she has skillfully employed realism and naturalism
(in her novels), stream-of-consciousness (notably in The Narrows), and
indirect discourse (in her novels and many of her stories).
Her experiments with varied techniques and voices (male and female,
black and white) underscore Petry’s fascination with multiple perspectives.
In “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” and Country Place, she explores
the complementary roles that narrators and listeners play in a story’s
creation. “The Witness” contains a related theme: As readers, we “witness”
Woodruff’s tale, just as he witnesses a crime. At the end of “The Witness,”
we are in a position quite similar to Woodruff’s. Our personal perspective
influences our understanding of his tale. Given our individual circumstances,
will we repeat his tale? Or will we try to keep the story, and all of its
difficulties, as a troubling secret?
Petry defies easy categorization, partly because she is contemporary with
writers as far removed from each other in time and aesthetics as Richard
Wright and Toni Morrison. But Petry can be productively compared and
contrasted with authors representing several different strands of American
literature.
As an African-American woman, she fits in a historical continuum
including Harriet Wilson and Harriet Jacobs in the nineteenth century; Nella
Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Brooks in the first half of the
twentieth century; and Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and
Terry McMillan (among others) today. The beginning of her career in the
mid-1940s also suggests a natural grouping with Wright as well as with
Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes. As a writer preoccupied with communities
and the social problems they harbor, Petry invites comparison with William
Faulkner and Eudora Welty. And her fictional explorations of New England
put her in the company of writers as diverse as Henry David Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sarah Orne Jewett.
1.
Students reading “The Witness” will have several natural points of
identification: their experience as teenagers, their contact with
teachers/authority figures, and their perceptions of race relations and
sexual politics. But because “The Witness” invites us to transcend
individual perspectives, I use study questions that probe the story’s
intriguing ambiguities: How does this story complicate conventional
perceptions of protagonist versus adversary? Identify the
characteristics that prevent Charles Woodruff and Dr. Shipley, the
Congregational minister, from being wholly “good” characters. Are
the boys who attack Nellie entirely “evil”? Explain your opinion.
How are these boys different from the students Woodruff describes
as the “Willing Workers of America”? How do the boys’ violent acts
reflect on the town of Wheeling? How might Woodruff’s relationship
with his wife (encapsulated in his memories) affect his decision to
leave Wheeling? How might we as readers, and potential critics,
identify with Woodruff’s plight at the end of the story?
2. Critical essays might address the following topics: the theme of
“witnessing” in both its religious and secular senses; the double
standard Woodruff endures as a black male authority figure; and the
story’s connections between racism and sexism (a recurring theme in
Petry’s work). For longer papers, students might compare “The
Witness” to one of the other Wheeling stories in Miss Muriel and
Other Stories, or compare Woodruff with The Street’s Lutie Johnson.
Bibliography
See Hazel Arnett Ervin’s Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography (G. K. Hall, 1993);
Gates and Appiah, eds., Ann Petry: Critical Perspectives Past and Present
(Amistad, 1994); Hilary Holladay’s Ann Petry (Twayne, 1996); and Lindon
Barrett’s Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge University Press,
1999).
Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956)
Contributing Editors: Amy Ling, Oscar Campomanes,
and King-Kok Cheung
Some readers may be repulsed by what they consider an overly negative
portrayal of American society. Their reactions range from incredulity to
discomfort to rejection of what they consider to be exaggeration. Other
readers are quick to dismiss Bulosan on aesthetic criteria, believing America
Is in the Heart to be autobiographical and sociological rather than “literary.”
The issue of genre is another problem area: His fiction seems
autobiographical, his poetry prosy, his short stories read like essays and his
essays like short stories.
Providing students with biographical background on Bulosan and
giving them historical information on Philippine immigration will set this
text into its proper context. This text is primarily a novel and at the same
time, as Carey McWilliams has pointed out, “it reflects the collective life
experience of thousands of Filipino immigrants who were attracted to this
country by its legendary promises of a better life.”
If a slide show or video on Philippine immigration is obtainable, it
would provide useful information. The film Manongs from Visual
Communications in California is an excellent introduction. NAATA/Cross
Current Media at 346 Ninth Street, San Francisco is an excellent source of
Asian- American videos.
As students read Bulosan, they ask, “Who is this man? What group
does he belong to? What are his concerns? Is the plight of the immigrant
today different than it was in the 1930s and 1940s?”
Issues
Bulosan’s major theme is exile and return—the effect of departure from
home and the necessity to return to the Philippines in order to make sense of
the exile’s experience in the United States because of the colonial status of
the Philippines.
His second purpose is to record his own, his family’s, and his friends’
experiences and lives, their loneliness and alienation.
Bulosan wrote with an eye to violating literary conventions, as mentioned
above. As a political activist and labor organizer, he also believed that
creative literary activity and social purpose cannot be separated. Students
should be made aware of the gulf between the ideals of America as the land
of equality and opportunity and the painful, violent reality Bulosan
delineates in this representative selection of America Is in the Heart.
Original Audience
Bulosan, at the beginning of his career, wrote for a mainstream American
audience, and was placed in the position of cultural mediator, a bridge
between the Philippines (which America wanted to know better during
World War II) and the United States. Late in life, he consciously cultivated a
Filipino audience, sending stories back to the Philippines, most of which
were rejected. In the 1970s, he was “rediscovered” by Asian-Americans
delighted to have found a spokesperson as prolific and multifaceted as he.
In his unadorned, deceptively simple prose style, he resembles Ernest
Hemingway; in his social concerns, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Bulosan may be compared with Maxine Hong Kingston in that both were
critically acclaimed by a wide audience but denounced by certain portions of
their own community who accused them of having “sold out.” With
Kingston he also shares a reliance on peasant forms of storytelling as well as
the seeming incoherence of their works and the question of genre.
1.
2.
The students may be directed to think about whether there are
distinguishing characteristics to Filipino immigrant experience
setting it apart from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or any European
group.
Ask students to keep a journal of their random reactions to the text.
On a sheet of paper, have them record quotes, phrases, or words from
the text that were particularly significant to them; on the right-hand
side of the sheet, they are to record their reactions. Later they write a
one page statement of their responses, setting up a dialogue between
themselves and their instructor. The instructor then makes a response
and dittoes up the dialogue so that the entire class can enter into the
dialogue. Finally the class writes papers on the entire classroom-wide
dialogue.
Bibliography
Gier, Jean Vengua. “ ‘. . . to Have Come from Someplace’: October Light,
America Is in the Heart, and ‘Flip’ Writing after the Third World
Strikes.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American
Cultural Criticism 2.2 (1995): 1–33.
Gonzalez, N. V. M., and Oscar V. Campomanes. “Filipono American
Literature. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature.
Ed. King-Kok Cheung. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996,
62–124.
Gotera, Vince. “Carlos Bulosan: Passion, Poetry, Politics.” Connecticut
Review 15.2 (1993): 11–23.
Jaskoski, Helen. “Carlos Bulosan’s Literary Debt to Richard Wright.”
Literary Influence and African-American Writers. Ed. Tracy
Mishkin. New York: Garland, 1996, 231–43.
Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered
Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999.
Mostern, Kenneth. “Why Is America in the Heart?” Hitting Critical Mass:
A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2.2 (1995): 35–65.
San Juan, E., Jr. “Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament of the Asian
Writer in Late Capitalism.” American Literary History 3.3 (1991):
542–65.
San Juan, E., Jr. “In Search of Filipino Writing: Reclaiming Whose
‘America’? The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995, 213–40.
San Juan, E., Jr. “Searching for the Heart of ‘America’ (Carlos Bulosan).”
Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays. Ed. John R.
Maitino and David R. Peck. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico
Press, 1996, 259–72.
Mario Suarez (1925–1998)
Teaching material for Mario Suarez is available on The Heath Anthology
web site. (To access the site, please go to the Houghton Mifflin college home
page at http.//college.hmco.com. Select English, then select The Heath
Anthology textbook site.)
Frank Chinn (b. 1940)
Teaching material for Frank Chinn is available on The Heath Anthology web
site. (To access the site, please go to the Houghton Mifflin college home
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
Contributing Editor: Beverly Lyon Clark1
My students have trouble dealing with the horror that O’Connor evokes—
often they want to dismiss the story out of hand, while I want to use it to
raise questions. Another problem pertains to religious belief: Either students
lack any such belief (which might make a kind of sense of O’Connor’s
violence) or else, possessing it, they latch onto O’Connor’s religious explications at the expense of any other approach.
I like to start with students’ gut responses—to start with where they
already are and to make sure I address the affective as well as the cognitive.
In particular, I break the class into groups of five and ask students to try to
build consensus in answering study questions.
In general, the elusiveness of O’Connor’s best stories makes them
eminently teachable—pushing students to sustain ambiguity, to withhold
final judgments. It also pushes me to teach better—to empower students
more effectively, since I don’t have all the answers at my fingertips. My
responses to O’Connor are always tentative, exploratory. I start, as do most
of my students, with a gut response that is negative. For O’Connor defies my
humanistic values—she distances the characters and thwarts compassion.
Above all, O’Connor’s work raises tantalizing questions. Is she, as John
1
*With thanks to LynAnn Mastaj and her classmates for comments on these questions.
Hawkes suggests, “happily on the side of the devil”? Or, on the contrary,
does the diabolical Misfit function, paradoxically, as an agent of grace? We
know what O’Connor wants us to believe. But should we?
Issues
One important context that I need to provide for my students is background
on O’Connor’s Christianity. The most useful source here is O’Connor’s own
essays and lectures, which often explain how to read her works as she would
have them read. Certainly O’Connor’s pronouncements have guided much of
the criticism of her work. I’ll summarize some of her main points.
She states that the subject of her work is “the action of grace in
territory held largely by the devil” (Mystery and Manners 118). She tries to
portray in each story “an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally
believable” (118), often an act of violence, violence being “the extreme
situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (113). Through violence
she wants to evoke Christian mystery, though she doesn’t exclude other
approaches to her fiction: she states that she could not have written “A Good
Man Is Hard to Find” in any other way but “there are perhaps other ways
than my own in which this story could be read” (109).
In general O’Connor explains that she is not so much a realist of the
social fabric as a “realist of distances” (44), portraying both concrete
everyday manners and something more, something beyond the ordinary: “It
is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners” (124). She
admits too that her fiction might be called grotesque, though she cautions
that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by
the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be
called realistic” (40). And she connects her religious concerns with being
southern, for, she says, “while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most
certainly Christ-haunted” (44).
I also find it important to address the question of racism in the story.
Is the story racist? I ask. Is the grandmother racist, in her comments on cute
little pickaninnies and her use of “nigger”? Does the narrator endorse the
grandmother’s attitude? And what do we make of her naming a cat Pitty
Sing—a pseudo-Japanese name that sounds less like Japanese than like a
babytalk version of “pretty thing”? Is O’Connor simply presenting
characteristically racist attitudes of not particularly admirable characters? I
find Alice Walker’s comments helpful here, on O’Connor’s respectful
reluctance to enter the minds of black characters and pretend to know what
they’re thinking.
O’Connor is usually compared to writers who are southern or gothic or
Catholic or some combination thereof: for example, William Faulkner,
Nathanael West, Graham Greene. Louise Westling (in Sacred Groves and
Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and
Flannery O’Connor [University of Georgia Press, 1985]) has made fruitful
comparisons with Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, though most critics
seem to find it difficult to discover points of comparison with other women
writers.
The following questions can be given to students in advance or used to guide
discussion during class:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
What qualities of the grandmother do you like? What qualities do
you dislike? How did you feel when The Misfit killed her? Why?
How would you characterize the other members of the family? What
is the function of images like the following: the mother’s “face was
as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green
head-kerchief that had two points on the top like a rabbit’s ears” and
the grandmother’s “big black valise looked like the head of a
hippopotamus”?
How does O’Connor foreshadow the encounter with The Misfit?
What does the grandmother mean by a “good man”? Whom does she
consider good people? What are other possible meanings of “good”?
Why does she tell The Misfit that he’s a good man? Is there any
sense in which he is?
What is the significance of the discussion of Jesus? Was he a good
man?
What is the significance of the grandmother’s saying, “Why you’re
one of my babies. You’re one of my own children”?
What is the significance of The Misfit’s saying, “She would of been
a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every
minute of her life”?
There are, of course, no absolute answers to these questions; the
story resists easy solutions, violates the reader’s expectations.
Bibliography
Other O’Connor stories well worth reading and teaching include
“The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Good Country
People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Revelation,” and
“Parker’s Back” (all in The Complete Stories [Farrar, 1971]).
O’Connor’s essays have been collected in Mystery and Manners
(Farrar, 1969). The fullest collection of works by O’Connor is the
Collected Works (Library of America, 1988).
As for secondary sources, the fullest biography so far, at least
until O’Connor’s long-time friend Sally Fitzgerald completes hers, is
Lorine M. Getz’s Flannery O’Connor: Her Life, Library and Book
Reviews (Mellen, 1980).
For discussion of O’Connor’s social, religious, and
intellectual milieux, see Robert Coles’s Flannery O’Connor’s South
(Louisiana State University Press, 1980). A fine companion piece is
Barbara McKenzie’s photographic essay, Flannery O’Connor’s
Georgia (University of Georgia Press, 1980).
Four collections of essays provide a good range of criticism
on O’Connor:
1.
2.
3.
4.
The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor,
edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (1966; rpt.
Fordham University Press, 1977).
Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor, edited by Melvin J.
Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark (Hall, 1985).
Flannery O’Connor, edited by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1986).
Realist of Distances: Flannery O’Connor Revisited, edited by KarlHeinz Westarp and Jan Nordby Gretlund (Aarhus, 1987).
The Friedman and Clark collection, for instance, includes the Walker and
Hawkes essays alluded to above: John Hawkes, “Flannery O’Connor’s
Devil,” Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 395–407; Alice Walker, “Beyond the
Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens. Harcourt, 1983.
Overall, criticism of O’Connor has appeared in more than forty
book-length studies and hundreds of articles (including those published
annually in the Flannery O’Connor Bulletin). Most criticism continues to be
either religious or formalist. But for a discussion that situates O’Connor’s
work historically, in the postwar era, addressing its intersections with liberal
discourse, see Thomas Hill Schaub’s chapter on O’Connor in American
Fiction in the Cold War (Wisconsin, 1991).
Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
Contributing Editor: Eileen T. Bender
In a time of instant fare—both literal and intellectual—Joyce Carol Oates is
most demanding. A master of short fiction, she has also published a large
number of novels and novellas, both under her own name and under a
pseudonym, “Rosamond Smith.” Indeed, Oates has produced an amazing
variety of work in virtually all literary genres: novels, short stories, drama,
critical essays, screenplays, opera libretti, poetry, reviews of contemporary
writing and ideas. She reads, edits, and teaches, currently holding a chair
professorship at Princeton University. She defeats those readers who want
artists to fit certain categories. Extremely well read and at home in the
classroom, Oates is often deliberately allusive.
While she calls her writing “experimental,” Oates’s works are highly
accessible—at least at first glance. Often, as in “Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?” they begin in familiar territory. The central
characters and the scenes are vivid and recognizable. Details (in this case,
the drive-in teen culture, the sibling rivalry, the snatches of popular songs)
enhance the sense of déjà vu. Yet by the end, dark and violent forces surface
to baffle conventional expectations of both character and plot. Once again,
the so-called “Dark Lady of American Letters” creates a disturbance,
challenging the reader to think of both fiction and reality with new and
deeper understanding.
Because of the variety of her work, Oates can be viewed as a
“woman of letters.” Students will be interested in a writer who is constantly
engaged in public discussion (in print most frequently) of the arts: they
should watch for her letters to the editor, interviews, essays, and reviews in
the New York Times, and frequent articles in the popular press.
Oates’s work itself can be approached at different levels of
sophistication. It is always interesting to explore the many allusive patterns
in her fiction. Several of her short stories are meant as explicit imitations of
famous forebears (e.g., “The Dead,” “Metamorphosis,” “The Lady With the
Pet Dog”), and those can be read in tandem to see the complexity of Oates’s
relationship to literary tradition.
In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates makes an
ordinary tale extraordinary by juxtaposing two powerful legends: the modern
rock hero (the story is dedicated to activist-song writer Bob Dylan), and the
ancient demon lover. Drawing together these threads, Oates is able to tell a
chilling tale of a young adolescent, tantalized by glamorous surfaces, unable
to resist more satanic designs. In this case, the “accessible” story needs to be
peeled back, in order for Oates’s intentions and the full sense of the work to
be understood.
In responding to this story, students are disturbed by the violence that
erupts from ordinary reality, and question its function or purpose—
especially if they view literature as a kind of moral lesson or as an escape
into a world elsewhere (the romantic paradigm). They will ask questions
about the author herself, surprised that so academic and soft-spoken a person
is capable of describing such violence in her stories. These responses
provide an ideal occasion to discuss the creative process, and the difference
between author and character, biography and literature, reality imagined and
imaginative reality.
Issues
At the center of much of Oates’s work is concern about the singular power
of the self, and the high cost of the struggle for autonomy. In this, she is like
those contemporary “third force” psychologists she has studied and admired
(chiefly Maslow) who posit a different human ideal: communion rather than
mastery. Readers might focus on the patterns of selfhood and the
possibilities for relationship in her work.
Oates also calls herself a “feminist” although she does not like the
restrictive title of “woman writer”; rather, she prefers being described as a
woman who writes. In her exploration of character and relationships, the
nature of love and sexual power are frequently at issue. Again, this would be
a fruitful topic for further reading and discussion, using Oates’s own essays
on androgyny, feminism, and the special circumstances of the “woman who
writes” as starting point.
Oates is not only an avid student of literature and reader of history,
psychology, and philosophy; she is a keen interpreter of the contemporary
scene, concerned in her work with issues relevant to most modern readers.
Besides feminist questions, her work has dealt with politics, migrant
workers, racial conflict, academic life, girl gangs, medical and legal ethics,
urban riots, and, perhaps most surprisingly, boxing. Such work is
immediately accessible to students. It also allows Oates to expose her own
sense of the wonder and mystery of human character and personality.
Since her first novel was published in 1964, Oates has tested almost every
major literary school or set of conventions: naturalism, existentialism, social
realism, detective stories, epic chronicle, romance. Presenting excerpts from
Oates’s novels would not only show her versatility, but would convey the
way literature has an important and imposing influence on the modern
writer.
While the story in this anthology unfolds chronologically and
appears conventional, the more surrealistic subtext imposes itself and
frustrates the fairy-tale or “happy ending” quest. The subversion of one
convention by another here is not only interesting in its own right, but
enforces Oates’s thematic design.
Original Audience
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is of course a
contemporary story; yet it also rests on a diminishing sense of recent history.
It was written for an audience who had themselves lived through the
tumultuous American 1960s, with its antiwar activism, folk and rock music,
and emergent “youth culture.” If indeed the hippies of that time are the
middle-aged establishment of today, it would be important for students to
reacquaint themselves with the work of Bob Dylan (the story’s dedicatee)
and others represented, as well as the perilous uncertainty of those times,
which would have heightened the risks of adolescent passage.
While Oates has been variously compared and contrasted with Eudora
Welty, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and even Theodore Dreiser, one
of the more interesting writers with whom she might be compared is
Flannery O’Connor. (Oates even wrote a moving poem about her, following
O’Connor’s death.) “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” can
best be compared with O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in which
gratuitous and even mindless violence bursts through and destroys the pious
confidence of O’Connor’s ordinary country people. Both Oates and
O’Connor emphasize the reality and presence of evil. But in O’Connor’s
case, the imminence of evil transforms visible reality into mere illusion. For
Oates, naivete (not innocence) is dangerous in a perennially fallen but
vividly real world.
two
“legends” that are important to the story: Dylan and Demon.
Questions useful before reading the selection would concern the
1.
2.
3.
4.
Why is this story dedicated to Bob Dylan?
Who is Arnold Friend? Do you think he is appropriately
named? What is the significance of his car? His clothing? His
language?
When and why does Connie begin to question his identity?
What impact does her confusion have on her own personality?
How are “personality” and “identity” displayed and defined in
this story?
Note the complex interactions among the female characters in
the story: girlfriends, siblings, and the mother-daughter
relationship. In what sense is the story about a woman’s
“coming of age”?
Additionally, students may need more background on Dylan and the
’60s to understand Oates’s view of the demonic aspect of those times in
America.
In dealing with this story, students might be asked to put themselves
in the place of Connie’s sister or one of Connie’s “real” friends, describing
Friend or their perception of what has happened. The title should be
discussed. Students can be asked to find the Dylan lyric that gives the story
its title, play it for the class, and lead a discussion of the culture and politics
of the 1960s; photographs of that time could be especially useful in picturing
the look and style Friend tries to emulate. Students might write about the
danger of “codes”: their power to distort perception.
Another approach could be aesthetic: specifically, viewing the story
not as realistic but surrealistic. Here, paintings of modern masters such as
Magritte or Dali could illustrate the hauntingly familiar contours of the
surrealistic imagination—another possible written assignment. Oates herself
refers to an earlier surrealist, Bosch, in the title of an early novel, A Garden
of Earthly Delights. That painting might generate a lively discussion of
Oates’s vision of evil.
Finally, Joyce Chopra’s excellent 1985 film adaptation of the story,
Smooth Talk, can spark an interesting discussion of how Oates’s narrative is
transformed cinematically.
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen T. Joyce Carol Oates, Artist in Residence. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
Clemons, Walter. “Joyce Carol Oates: Love and Violence.” Newsweek, 11
(Dec. 1972): 72–77.
Creighton, Joanne. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
Daly, Brenda. Lavish Self-Divisions; The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Friedman, Ellen. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Ungar, 1970.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Norman, Torburg. Isolation and Contact: A Study of Character Relationships in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories. Goteburg, Sweden:
Gothenburg Studies in English 57, 1984.
Showalter, Elaine, ed. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”/
Joyce Carol Oates. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1994. (Story with critical essays, introduction.)
Wagner, Linda. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1979.
John Updike (b. 1932)
Contributing Editor: George J. Searles
It is sometimes said that Updike is too narrowly an interpreter of the WASP/
yuppie environment, a realm of somewhat limited interest; another is that his
work proceeds from a too exclusively male perspective. The former concern
will, of course, be more/less problematic depending on the nature of the
college (more problematic at an urban community college, less so at a
“prestige” school). The latter charge, however, provides the basis for fruitful
discussion in any academic environment.
First, it’s important to point out what Henry James once said, to the
effect that we must grant an author’s donnée and evaluate only in terms of
what is made of it. But in Updike’s case, it’s also necessary to stress that his
real concerns transcend his surface preoccupations. Although he’s often
described as a chronicler of social ills, really he’s after larger game—the
sheer intractability of the human predicament. Students must be shown that
in Updike the particular is simply an avenue to the universal.
In addition to Updike’s stories, students should be referred to the
magazine articles listed in the bibliography and to the 1979 short story
collection Too Far to Go, which reprints all the previous “Maples” stories,
along with several then-new ones, including “Separating.” Also useful is the
videotaped television special based on that collection. Another instructive
exercise is to compare this story with some of Updike’s early poems,
particularly “Home Movies”—a little gem in its own right. Indeed, there’s a
direct echo of this poem near the story’s conclusion: “We cannot climb
back . . ./To that calm light. The brief film ends” is rendered in “Separating”
as “You cannot climb back . . . you can only fall.”
Issues
During the course of his long and prolific career, Updike has produced a
series of interlocking short stories about Richard and Joan Maple, an
upwardly mobile but unhappy couple whose ill-fated union closely parallels
Updike’s own first marriage to his college sweetheart, Mary Pennington. As
critic Suzanne Henning Uphaus has neatly summarized it:
“The stories, written over a span of twenty-three years, follow the
outward events. . . . Dick Maple, like Updike, married in the early fifties
when he was twenty-one; both couples had four children, separated after
twenty-one years, and finally received one of the first no-fault divorces
granted in the state of Massachusetts.”
This is probably the place from which to launch a classroom
treatment of a story like “Separating.”
Consider the protagonist’s bleak assertion in Updike’s Roger’s
Version: “There are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy
trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit
below” (74). Surely this has much to do with Dickie’s baleful question
“Why?” at the end of “Separating,” and his father’s perception of the boy’s
query as “a window thrown open on emptiness.”
Updike is acknowledged as a master stylist. “Separating” provides ample
evidence of his skill in this area. Note, for example, the story’s subtle but
relentless accumulation of negative imagery. Again and again, key details
reinforce Maple’s inner sense of inadequacy, failure, and dread.
Simultaneously, however, these images are juxtaposed with details of an
ironically playful nature, thereby establishing a balance of sorts between
angst and whimsy, a tone of amused negation that’s perfectly suited to
Updike’s view of the human condition.
Original Audience
As this is a contemporary story, the “when/now” issue is not
relevant. As for audience, I think that Updike sees himself
writing for people more or less like himself: WASP, affluent,
etc. But again, it’s important when teaching Updike’s work to
show that the problems his characters confront are in a broad
sense everyone’s problems: responsibility, guilt, mortality, etc.
Updike is an exceptionally autobiographical writer. Perhaps that’s the place
to begin with a story like “Separating.” Although this approach violates
several critical tenets, it will get things rolling, and will lead ideally to
discussion of the relationship between fiction and autobiography . . . how
writers transmute personal experience into art. Comparisons can be drawn in
this regard between Updike and Philip Roth and John Irving. Useful, too, is a
consideration of the several New Yorker short stories by Updike’s son David,
collected in Out On the Marsh (New American Library, 1988): “Separating”
from another angle.
In a lower-level course (e.g., Freshman Comp, Intro to Lit) Updike’s work—
and especially a story like “Separating”—can generate good “personal
experience” papers, as so many students today have first- or secondhand
knowledge of separation and divorce.
Obviously, the story also lends itself exceptionally well to treatments
of the whole “responsibility to self versus responsibility to other” idea.
Bibliography
Atlas, James. “John Updike Breaks Out of Suburbia.” The New York Times
Magazine (10 December 1978): 60–64, 68–76.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic.”
Saturday Review (October 1981): 14–22.
———. “Updike’s Struggle to Portray Women.” The New York Times (5
May 1988).
Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York:
Twayne, 1993.
Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914–1994)
Contributing Editor: John Alberti
“Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” Ellison’s acceptance speech on
being presented the National Book Award in 1953 for Invisible Man, can
provide some starting points for class discussion of the two short stories
included in The Heath Anthology. In the speech, Ellison defines what he sees
as the moral responsibilities of the American writer, both in terms of theme
and style. Recalling “our classical nineteenth-century novelists” (presumably
writers like Melville, Hawthorne, and Stowe), Ellison calls on contemporary
writers to return to the “much greater responsibility for the condition of
democracy” demonstrated in their novels, which he describes as
“imaginative projections of the conflicts within the human heart when the
sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed with the
practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love.” As an AfricanAmerican writer, Ellison says he is especially drawn to the way that in these
novels “the Negro was the gauge of the human condition as it waxed and
waned in our democracy.” “Our task,” Ellison concludes, “is always to
challenge the apparent forms of reality” and to do so with a prose that is as
“flexible, and swift as American change is swift.” Operating as both goal
and article of faith for Ellison is the idea that, ultimately, “American
experience” (and by extension the American people) “is of a whole.”
One way into Ellison’s stories, then, is to consider how well they
exemplify these ideals, both in their graphic, unsparing depictions of the
brutality of racism and their invocation of flight as an image of freedom and
possibility. In keeping with Ellison’s insistence on expressing the
multiplicity of experience, he tells these stories of racial oppression through
two very different narrators: a young white boy facing initiation into a
legacy of hatred and violence and a young black aviator struggling against
internalizing social assumptions of black inferiority. Some overarching
questions to consider might be whether and to what extent these different
perspectives finally tell one story and what possibilities these stories hold out
for challenging and transforming the realities they describe. What are the
prospects for communication, empathy, and reconciliation between the
narrators of these two stories?
In approaching these stories as rhetorical performances, it is
important to consider the question of audience, both the original reading
public Ellison may have had in mind when writing these stories (and in this
light the fact that “A Party down at the Square” remained unpublished in
Ellison’s lifetime could be significant) and the demographic context of the
classroom where the stories are being discussed: how students in the class
identify themselves or find themselves identified racially, geographically,
and historically will condition their identification with and interpretation of
these two narrators, not necessarily in easily or stereotypically predictable
ways, but in significant ways that can be foregrounded as part of class
discussion. This is especially true for “A Party Down at the Square,” where
readers are asked to measure their reactions to the horrific events described
against their understanding of and sympathy with the young white narrator
of the story. The story shares with “Flying Home” the use of the airplane as
a complex symbol of modernity, freedom, power, and affluence; in this case,
however, the symbol becomes literally entangled in power lines, perhaps
suggesting a similar contrast between the ideas of modernity and progress
and the legacy of racial oppression embodied in the lynching and the statue
of the Confederate Army general overseeing the spectacle. The narrator,
significantly a child on the verge of adolescence, acts as a symbolic locus for
this conflict, and the moral drama of the story centers on his reactions to the
lynching and the ways we as readers think his outlook and actions will be
affected. Of particular interest in this story is the way Ellison focuses on the
ways white Americans destroy themselves spiritually and even physically
through the maintenance of racism (both a white woman and a black man are
burned alive during the story, achieving a grisly communion in the blackness
of their ashes and the whiteness of bone) as the boy confronts the idea that
his “racial” inheritance consists not only of social status and power but also
unthinking hatred and violence.
“Flying Home” evokes both the Icarus myth from Greek mythology,
with its focus on the heroism and tragedy of ambition, and the “flying
African” story from African-American culture, with its invocation of
freedom and escape. For Todd in the story, flight represents a way to soar
above the limitations imposed by racism on the Earth below, but in his hopes
that success as a military aviator will finally “prove” the legitimacy of his
and other African Americans’ claims to full and equal status in American
society, the story suggests he carries those limitations with him as he flies.
The story also points to a very specific historical context, as the experience
of African-American soldiers in the Second World War, a war fought against
a racist German government, in many ways brought to a head frustrations
over segregation and racism in the United States and was a key contributing
factor to the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s. One
question for class discussion, then, can center on the strategies and
difficulties of “proving” one’s humanity according to the criteria of a racist
society built on the systematic denial of any such claims.
Todd’s own ambivalence about his chances for success are embodied
in the tension between himself and Jefferson, the poor sharecropper who
helps him after the plane crashes. Todd wants to distance himself from a
man he sees as a symbol of rural ignorance and passive acceptance of racist
oppression, yet he experiences feelings of guilt about these feelings and
about how his accident will be interpreted both by white authority figures
and other African Americans. At the center of this conflict, Jefferson tells
Todd his folktale about his time in heaven, itself another use of the flying
African myth. The result is a story within a story, and students can consider
how Jefferson’s story relates to Todd’s, particularly in relation to Todd’s
fear and anger that Jefferson may be making fun of him. These questions of
insecurity again raise the issue of the psychological damage done by racism
that we encounter in “A Party down at the Square,” and they can also bring
us back to the ironic title of Ellison’s National Book Award acceptance
essay. How does the self-mocking tone of “Brave Words for a Startling
Occasion” lead us to think about Ellison’s own rhetorical position in
accepting the award? While seizing the opportunity to make some very
specific demands of American writers, there is also a note of suspicion in
regards to what the motives of the (largely white) critics who present him
this award might be. In the end, we are left thinking about in what ways
Todd’s ambitions and fears might relate to Ellison’s own (successful)
attempt to claim a position in American literary history.
Bibliography
Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences, 1989.
Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison, 1991.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Politics in the African-American Novel, 1991.
James Baldwin (1924–1987)
Contributing Editors: Trudier Harris and John Reilly
Problems surround Baldwin’s voicing the subjectivity of characters, the
great sympathy he awards to the outlook of the marginalized. Students
normally meet the underclass as victims perhaps objectified by statistics and
case studies. For that matter, students who are not African American have
difficulty with the black orientation arising from Baldwin’s middle-class
characters: the artists and other, more conventionally successful people.
The strategies flow from the principle that people do not experience
their lives as victims, even if Baldwin’s popular social autobiographical
essay Notes of a Native Son—the portion where he recounts contracting the
“dread, chronic disease” of anger and fury when denied service in a diner—
might be useful in raising the issue of why Baldwin says every AfricanAmerican has a Bigger Thomas in his head. The anger may become creative,
as might the pain. A companion discussion explores the importance of blues
aesthetic to Baldwin: the artful treatment of common experience by a
singular singer whose call evokes a responsive confirmation from those who
listen to it. In addition, an exploration of the aesthetic of popular black music
would also enhance the students’ understanding.
Within a literary context, the strategies should establish that fictional
narrative is the only way we know the interior experience of other people.
The imagination creating the narrative presents an elusive subjectivity. If a
writer is self-defined as African American, that writer will aim to inscribe
the collective subjectivity under the aspect of a particular character. Of
course, the point is valid for women writers and other groups also, as long as
the writers have chosen deliberately to identify themselves as part of the
collective body.
Issues
Themes of personal importance include the significance of community
identification, the communion achieved in “Sonny’s Blues,” for example; the
conflicted feelings following success when that requires departure from the
home community; the power of love to bridge difference. The chief
historical issue centers on the experience of urbanization following
migration from an agricultural society. The philosophical issue concerns
Baldwin’s use of religious imagery and outlook, his interest in redemption
and the freeing of spirit. Interestingly, this philosophical/religious issue is
often conveyed in the secular terms of blues, but transcendence remains the
point.
Baldwin’s frequent use of the first-person narration and the personal essay
naturally associates his writing with autobiography. His fiction should be
discussed in relation to the traditions of African-American autobiography
which, since the fugitive slave narratives, has presented a theme of liberation
from external bondage and a freeing of subjectivity to express itself in
writing. As for period, his writing should be looked at as a successor to
polemical protest; thus, it is temporally founded in the 1950s and 1960s.
Original Audience
In class I ask students to search out signs that the narrative was written for
one audience or the other: What knowledge is expected of the reader? What
past experiences are shared by assumption? Incidentally, this makes an
interesting way to overcome the resistance to the material. Without being
much aware that they are experiencing African-American culture, most
Americans like the style and sound of blues and jazz, share some of the ways
of dress associated with those arts and their audiences, and know the speech
patterns.
One can make a comparison with Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and
Richard Wright’s Native Son. The basis is the degree of identification with
African-Americans accomplished in each. How closely does the writer
approach the consciousness of the black slave and street kids? Measure and
discuss the gap between the shock felt by Delano and the communion of the
brothers in Baldwin’s story.
Keeping in mind that James Baldwin’s first experiences with “the word”
occurred in evangelical churches, see if that influences his use of the
“literary word.”
What does Baldwin’s short story tell you about the so-called ghetto
that you could not learn as well from an article in a sociology journal?
College students are responsive to questions of the ethics of success.
They may raise it with this story of “Sonny’s Blues” by wondering why the
narrator should feel guilty and even by speculating about what will happen
to the characters next.
Bibliography
“ ‘Sonny’s Blues’: James Baldwin’s Image of Black Community.” Negro
American Literature Forum 4, no. 2 (1970): 56–60. Rpt. in James Baldwin:
A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Keneth Kinnamon. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974, 139–46. Also reprinted in James Baldwin:
A Critical Evaluation, edited by Theman B. O’Daniel. Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press, 1977, 163–69.
Paule Marshall (b. 1929)
Contributing Editor: Dorothy L. Denniston
One strategy for approaching Marshall’s fiction is to explain the “Middle
Passage” to illustrate the placement of blacks all over the world (African
diaspora). It might also be helpful to discuss the notion of traditional African
cyclical time, which involves recurrence and duration, as opposed to
Western linear time, which suggests change and progress. The cyclic
approach applies thematically (Da-duh’s symbolic immortality) and
structurally (the story comes full circle). Also important is the traditional
African view of the world as being composed of dualities/opposites that
work together to constitute a harmonious moral order. (For a more complete
explanation, see Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen” in Reena and
Other Short Stories.)
Consider also discussing the African oral tradition as a recorder of
history and preserver of folk tradition. Since it is centered on the same ideas
as written literatures (the ideas, beliefs, hopes, and fears of a people), its
purpose is to create and maintain a group identity, to guide social action, to
encourage social interaction, and simply to entertain. The oral arts are
equally concerned with preserving the past to honor traditional values and to
reveal their relevance to the modern world. Marshall’s craftsmanship is
executed in such a dynamic fashion as to elicit responses usually reserved
for oral performance or theater.
Students readily respond to similarities/differences between black
cultures represented throughout the diaspora. Once they recognize African
cultural components as positive, they reevaluate old attitudes and beliefs and
begin to appreciate differences in cultural perspectives as they celebrate the
human spirit.
Issues
A major theme is the search for identity (personal and cultural). Marshall
insists upon the necessity for a “journey back” through history in order to
come to terms with one’s past as an explanation of the present and as a
guiding post for the future. For the author, in particular, the story becomes a
means to begin unraveling her multicultural background (American, African
American, African Caribbean). To be considered foremost is the theme
embodied in the epigram: the quality of life itself is threatened by giving
priority to materialistic values over those that nourish the human spirit.
Questions for form and style include Marshall’s manipulation of time and
her juxtaposition of images to create opposites (landscape, physical
description, culture). This suggests an artistic convention that is, at base,
African as it imitates or revives in another form the African oral narrative
tradition. In fact, Marshall merges Western literary tradition with that of the
African to create a new, distinctive expression.
Original Audience
All audiences find Marshall accessible. It might be interesting to contrast her
idyllic view of Barbados in “To Da-duh” with her later view in the story
“Barbados.” The audience may wish to share contemporary views of third
world countries and attitudes toward Western powers.
Both Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall deal with ancestral figures
(connections to the past) to underscore cyclical patterns or deviations from
them. Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), or Beloved
(1988) might be effectively compared to Marshall’s Praisesong for the
Widow (1983), Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), The Chosen Place, The
Timeless People (1969), or Daughters (1991).
Discuss the use of African and Caribbean imagery and explain why it is
essential to Marshall’s aesthetic.
Bibliography
Barthold, Bonnie. Black Time: Fiction in Africa, the Caribbean and the
United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a
Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Denniston, Dorothy. “Early Short Fiction by Paule Marshall.” Callaloo 6,
no. 2 (Spring–Summer, 1983). Reprinted in Short Story Criticism.
Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1990.
———. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History,
Culture and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.
Evans, Mari, ed. Section on Paule Marshall in Black Women Writers
(1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, New York:
Anchor, 1983.
Marshall, Paule. “Shaping the World of My Art.” New Letters (Autumn
1973).
Pettis, Joyce. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
Review especially the following:
Marshall, Paule. “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” In Reena and Other Short
Stories. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1983, 3–12.
Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophies. New York: Doubleday
and Co., 1970.
John Okada (1923–1971)
Contributing Editor: King Kok Cheung
Students need historical background concerning World War II and the
internment of Japanese Americans. Explain how people often internalize the
attitudes of the dominant society even though the attitudes may seem
unreasonable today. The documentary Rabbits in the Moon (1999), directed
by Emiko Omori, provides an excellent background for the JapaneseAmerican internment.
Issues
Historical context is crucial to the understanding of No-No Boy, since the
novel explores unflinchingly the issues of Japanese-American identity. Is it
half Japanese and half American, or is it neither? After the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, Japanese Americans in various coastal states—Washington, Oregon,
California—were interned on account of their ethnicity alone. Camp
authorities then administered a loyalty questionnaire that contained two
disconcerting questions: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the
United States in combat duty wherever ordered?” and “Will you swear
unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend
the United States from any or all attacks of foreign or domestic forces, and
forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, to
any other foreign government, power, or organization?”
These questions divided the Japanese-American community and
aggravated generational conflict. In some cases the parents still felt attached
to their country of origin, while their American-born children—nisei—
strived for an American identity. In other cases, the parents wanted to be
loyal to America, but their children were too bitter against the American
government to answer yes and yes.
Okada commands a style that is at once effusive and spontaneous, quiet and
deep. He has a keen eye for subtle details and psychological nuances that
enables him to capture the reserved yet affectionate interaction of Kenji’s
family.
Yet Okada seldom lingers on one key. He can change his note
rapidly from subdued pathos to withering irony, as when he moves from
depicting the silent grief in Kenji’s household to exposing racism at the Club
Oriental where Kenji feels totally comfortable because his being Japanese
there does not call attention to itself. At that very moment, there is a
commotion at the entrance: the Chinese owner reports that he has to prevent
two “niggers” from entering the club with a Japanese. The one place where
Kenji does not feel the sting of racial prejudice turns out to be just as racist
as others.
Compare No-No Boy with Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Jeanne Wakatsuki
Houston and James Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar. All three describe the
adverse impact of the internment of Japanese-American families. The novel
can also be compared with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and
Leslie Silko’s Ceremony; all three evoke the racial attitudes in the United
States during and after World War II.
1.
2.
(a) Why does Ichiro feel alienated?
(b) Why is Ichiro rejected by the people in his own ethnic
community? Who are the exceptions?
(c) How would you characterize the interaction in Kenji’s family?
(a) Compare the dilemmas of Ichiro and Kenji.
(b) Who is responsible for Ichiro’s suffering? Ichiro himself ? His
family? The Japanese-American community? America at large?
(c) Who is responsible for Kenji’s suffering?
Bibliography
Book-length literary works that dwell on the Japanese internment include the
following:
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki. Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American
Womanhood. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1985.
Inada, Lawson Fusao. Legends from Camp. St. Paul, MN: Coffee House
Press, 1993.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Sone, Monica. Nisei Daughter. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1979.
Uchida, Yoshiko. 1982. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese
American Family. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.
Yamada, Mitsuye. Camp Notes and Other Writings. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1998.
For a detailed study of the relation between historical circumstances and
literature, see the following:
Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings
and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1982.
Ling, Jinqi. “Race, Power, and Cultural Politics in John Okada’s No-No
Boy.” American Literature 67.2 (1995): 359–81.
A brief survey of Japanese-American literature can be found in:
Baker, Houston A., Jr., ed. Three American Literatures: Essays in
Chicano, Native American, and Asian American Literature for
Teachers of American Literature. New York: Modern Language
Association, 1982.
Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American
Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
See also:
Palumbo-Liu, David. “Discourse and Dislocation: Rhetorical Strategies
of Asian-American Exclusion and Confinement.” Lit: Literature
Interpretation Theory 2.1 (1990): 1–7.
Sato, Gayle K. Fujita. “Momotaro’s Exile: John Okada’s No-No Boy.”
In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin
Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992,
239–58.
Tillie Lerner Olsen (b. 1912)
Contributing Editor: Deborah S. Rosenfelt
Olsen’s work is relatively easy to teach since it addresses themes of concern
to contemporary students and since its experiments with language remain
within the bounds of realism. Tell Me a Riddle is among the most difficult of
Olsen’s works and some students have trouble for two reasons: They are
unfamiliar with the social and political history embedded in the novella and
they are confused by the allusive, stream-of-consciousness techniques Olsen
employs for the revelation of that history’s centrality in the consciousness of
the protagonist.
Since the knee-jerk negative reaction to “communists” is often a
problem, I make sure I discuss thoroughly the historical soil out of which
Tell Me a Riddle grows. Sometimes I show the film Seeing Reds. I always
read students a useful passage from A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of
an American Revolutionary (Delta, 1972, p. 8) by Al Richmond.
Showing the film version of Tell Me a Riddle can be a good strategy
for provoking discussion. The film itself is one of the rare representations of
older people’s lives and one of the few in which an older woman figures as
the protagonist. Reading passages from Olsen’s Silences, especially the
autobiographical ones, also proves helpful and interesting to students.
Students respond most immediately and deeply to Eva’s rage and
anger about the sacrifices her life has involved. They also get into painful
discussions about aging and dying, and about the limited options for the
elderly in American society. The questions they ask include the following:
Why won’t the grandmother (Eva) hold her grandchild? Please help us figure
out the configuration of family relationships in the story (here it helps if
students have also read the other stories in the Tell Me a Riddle volume).
Why doesn’t Eva want to see the rabbi in the hospital? Where do they go
when they go to the city on the beach (the answer to that one is Venice,
California, an area near Los Angeles that houses an old Jewish community
lovingly documented in the book and film, Number Our Days). Why won’t
David let her go home again?
Issues
Tell Me a Riddle is very rich thematically, historically, and personally. Its
central themes include the confrontation with aging, illness, and death; the
deprivations and struggles of poverty; the conflicts, full of love and rage, in
marital relations; the family, especially motherhood, as a site of both love
and nurturance and of repression; the buying of women’s sense of self and
the silencing of their capacities for expression over years of tending to the
needs and listening to the rhythms of others; the quest for meaning in one’s
personal life; and the affirmation of hope for and engagement on behalf of a
freer, more peaceful, more just and humane world.
The themes of Tell Me a Riddle are in many ways the themes of
Olsen’s life. Olsen’s parents took part in the 1905 revolution and became
Socialist party activists in the United States. Olsen herself became a
communist in the years when communism as a philosophy and as a
movement seemed to offer the best hope for an egalitarian society. Eva is
modeled partly on Olsen’s mother, who died of cancer, as does Eva.
I see Olsen as belonging to a tradition of women writers in this
country associated with the American left, who unite a class consciousness
and a feminist consciousness in their lives and creative work.
In Tell Me a Riddle, Olsen is deliberately experimental, fracturing
chronological sequence, using stream-of-consciousness techniques to
represent the processes of human consciousness, insisting on the evocative
power of each individual word. Though remaining within the bounds of
realism, she draws fully on the techniques of modernist fiction to render a
humanistic and socially impassioned vision rare in modernist and
postmodernist writing.
Original Audience
The question of audience is, I think, less relevant to contemporary writers
than to those of earlier centuries. I do speak about Olsen’s political background and about her special importance for contemporary women writers
and readers. It is also important that the stories of the Tell Me a Riddle
volume were written during the McCarthy era. All of them, especially Tell
Me a Riddle, subtly bear witness to the disappointment and despair of
progressives during that era, when the radical dreams and visions of the
thirties and forties were deliberately eradicated. Olsen’s family was one of
many to endure harassment by the FBI. Riddle’s topical allusions to Nazi
concentration camps and the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, and
David’s yearning for a time of belief and belonging, contribute to the subtext
of anguish and betrayal so characteristic of the literature of the period.
I find it useful to compare Tell Me a Riddle to other works by women
authors that record the tensions of “dual life,” especially those which, like
Riddle, deploy an imagery of speech and silencing not only to delineate the
protagonist’s quest for personal expression but also to develop her
relationship to processes of social change. Among the many works that
contain some configuration of these themes and images are Agnes
Smedley’s novel Daughter of Earth, Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker,
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
among Ghosts, much of the poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple, and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.
As stories of “secular humanist” Jewish family life, the work might
be compared with Grace Paley’s fiction or Meridel LeSueur’s The Girl.
As part of the tradition of working-class writers, she could be
compared with Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills, Agnes
Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, Henry
Roth’s Call It Sleep, and Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart.
As a story exploring the consciousness of one who is dying, students
might want to compare Riddle to Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilych.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
What is the immediate cause of the conflict in this story? Does the
author take sides in this conflict? Does this conflict have a
resolution? What underlying causes does it suggest?
Try to explain or account for the story’s title. What about the
subtitle?
Who is the “hero” of this story? Why?
This is a story about a woman dying of cancer. Did you find it
“depressing” or “inspiring”? Why?
Why is Eva so angry about the appearance of the rabbi in the
hospital? What does she mean by “Race, human; religion, none”?
What do we learn about Eva’s girlhood? Why do we learn it so late
in the story?
Discuss Jeanne’s role in the story.
Is David the same man at the end of the story as he was at the
beginning? Explain your answer.
Bibliography
Olsen’s personal/critical essays, those in Silences and that in Mother to
Daughter, Daughter to Mother, are very important sources of insight and
information. Especially recommended: pp. 5–46 in Silences, “Silences in
Literature” (1962), and “One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in
Our Century” (1971).
Other recommended reading:
Coiner, Constance. “Literature of Resistance: The Intersection of Feminism
and the Political Left in Tillie Olsen and Meridel LeSueur.” In
Politics
of Literature: Toward the 1990’s, edited by Lennard Davis
and Bella
Mirabella. New York: Columbia University Press.
Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Especially Chapters II and IV.
Rosenfelt, Deborah. “From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical
Tradition.” Feminist Studies 7:3 (Fall 1981): 371–406.
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
Contributing Editors: Cary Nelson and Janet Kaufman
The earliest poem here, taken from Rukeyser’s second book, dates from
1938; the most recent poems, taken from her last book, date from 1976.
These poems thus range across forty years of a career and forty years of
American culture and American history. Though there are very strong
continuities in Rukeyser’s work, it would be a mistake to imagine that all
these poems were written by a single consciousness in a single historical
moment. Their diverse forms and rhetorical styles represent the work of a
poet who sustained her core beliefs and commitments while responding to
changing historical, aesthetic, and cultural opportunities and pressures. She
wrote long sequence poems, documentary poems, short lyrics, and elegies.
Of all the responses one might make to this selection, the simplest one—and
the one most to be hoped for—is the decision to read more widely in her
work. That is, in a way, almost necessitated by this particular selection, since
one of the poems, “Absalom,” is taken from a longer poem sequence.
Certainly the instructor should read that sequence in its entirety and give the
class some sense of the poem’s context. The sequence, “The Book of the
Dead,” is available in both her Collected Poems (1979) and the Selected
Poems (1992). Readers should be warned that her earlier Selected Poems is
not a very successful representation of her work.
Since a number of these poems combine states of consciousness and
physical sensation, it is important for students not only to analyze them
rhetorically but also to place themselves empathetically inside the poems and
read them phenomenologically. What does it feel like to be the mother in
“Absalom” who has lost her family to industrial exploitation? What does it
feel like to speak in the two very different voices Rukeyser gives her? How
can one elaborate on the closing lines of “Martin Luther King, Malcolm X”:
“bleeding of my right hand/my black voice bleeding.” These poems are at
once gifts to the reader and demands made of us. In “Then,” a poem
published shortly before her death, Rukeyser wrote, “When I am dead, even
then,/I will still love you, I will wait in these poems.”
Issues
Some of Rukeyser’s major concerns are summarized in the headnote to the
poems themselves. Her biography, however, is not, so we sketch it briefly
here: Rukeyser was the elder child of upwardly mobile, Jewish, Americanborn parents. In 1944, at the very moment when the outlines of the
Holocaust were becoming known, she opened the seventh poem in her
sequence “Letter to the Front” with the startling lines, “To be a Jew in the
twentieth century/Is to be offered a gift.” Her father was a partner in a sandand-gravel company in New York. Seeing the concrete poured for sidewalks
and skyscrapers made her feel part of the city; later, somewhat like Hart
Crane, she would celebrate technology. From the Ethical Cultural and
Fieldston Schools in New York, she went on to study at Vassar and
Columbia until her father’s supposed bankruptcy prevented her from
continuing. Her mother had expected her to marry and write poetry only as
an avocation. Instead, Rukeyser made poetry the focus of her life, traveled,
lived in New York and California, and bore and raised a son as a single
mother.
Her career as an activist began when she traveled to
Alabama to cover the trial of the Scottsboro boys and was
arrested. In 1972 she went to Vietnam with Denise Levertov
on an unofficial writers’ peace mission. She taught at the
California Labor School in the mid-forties and from the midfifties through the sixties at Sarah Lawrence. She taught
children in Harlem and led writing classes for women in the
seventies. Especially in her later years Rukeyser broke taboos
about female sexuality. In poems like “Waiting for Icarus” and
“Myth” she rewrote classical myths from a woman’s
perspective. Here in “Rite” she dramatizes the culture’s
investments in gender and in “The Poem as Mask” overturns
gender dichotomy by treating it as a constructed myth. In a
culture that does not recognize the sexuality of old age,
Rukeyser celebrated it. She never labeled her sexuality, but in
poetry and letters she celebrated her intimate relations with
both women and men.
“Absalom” is the ninth of twenty poems in Rukeyser’s “The Book of the
Dead” in her 1938 book U.S. 1. A number of the poems are given over to the
perspective of individual figures in the Gauley Tunnel tragedy. Stylistically,
the poem is unusual for shifting from journalistic reportage to interior
monologue to lyrical description. It mixes public rhetoric and private speech,
judges America’s history and its contemporary institutions, and interrogates
natural and industrial power. It is one of the most important modern poems
in mixed forms and one of the major achievements of her career.
As with all socially conscious and progressive poetry read within a discipline
that has doubts about its viability, it is important to raise both general
intellectual issues and questions that lead students to read closely. Here are a
few examples:
1.
2.
3.
Compare and contrast how several white poets and several black
poets deal with issues of race—perhaps Rukeyser, Genevieve
Taggard, Kay Boyle, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Bennett, Claude
McKay, and Langston Hughes.
Rukeyser’s “Absalom” is a 1930s poem that would have been read at
the time as part of the proletarian literature movement. Compare this
with the 1930s poems in “A Sheaf of Political Poetry in the Modern
Period.”
Read about the classical myths behind “The Minotaur” and “The
4.
5.
Poem as Mask: Orpheus” and discuss how Rukeyser adapts and
transforms them.
What model of political action is put forward in “How We Did It”?
What does the poem say about means and ends?
“Rite” manages with its economical phrasing to both describe a rite
and enact one. Are they different?
Robert Hayden (1913–1980)
Contributing Editor: Robert M. Greenberg
It’s important to get students to fully appreciate Hayden’s effects of sound,
image, and atmosphere. For better appreciation of the poems’ aural qualities,
have students read such selections as “Summertime and the Living” and
“Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday” out loud.
Discuss a condensed narrative poem such as “Tour 5” as a short
story. This should permit a discussion of the evolving point of view of the
travelers and the evolving psychological quality of the imagery.
Point out also Hayden’s control of voice. “Mourning Poem,” for
example, is spoken in the idiom of the black church, as if by a chorus of
mourners; and if one reads the final lines to mean that the congregation did
suspect her of misbehaving, then the poem becomes a masterpiece of
wryness and irony.
Students are interested in questions like the following:
1.
2.
Is it possible to be both an ethnic and a universal (or liberal
humanist) writer? What constitutes universality? What constitutes
successful treatment of ethnic material?
Can a writer from a minority group write for a general educated
audience without giving up in resonance what is gained in breadth of
audience and reference?
Issues
Major themes are tension between the imagination and the tragic nature of
life; the past in the present; the nurturing power of early life and ethnically
colored memories.
Precede discussion of form and style with a discussion of the function of a
particular type of poem. For example, Hayden wrote spirit-of-place poems
such as “Tour 5,” which depend heavily on imagery; folk character poems
such as “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday,” which depend on
economy of characterization and humor; and early neighborhood poems such
as “Summertime and the Living,” which depend on realism mixed with
nostalgia, fancy, or psychological symbolism.
Original Audience
It is important to realize Hayden always wrote for a general literate audience,
not exclusively or even primarily for a black audience. The issue of audience
for him relates to the issue of the role of a poet.
Compare Yeats as an ethnic-universal poet to Hayden.
1.
2.
3.
“Tour 5”
(a) Discuss the human situation the poem describes. Consider its
treatment of both the external and internal aspects of the
experience for the travelers.
(b) Discuss the allusive quality of the adjectives used in the first
stanza to convey a festive mood and in the last three lines to
convey the violence of the Civil War and the cruelty of slavery.
(c) Discuss what makes this a poem of the first order. Conciseness,
controlled intensity, human drama, eloquence, and powerful
symbols are some of the qualities you might touch on.
“Summertime and the Living”
(a) Discuss Hayden’s use of a third-person retrospective point of
view to write about childhood. (It gives him the ability to be
both inside and outside the child’s perspective.)
(b) Discuss the sound of words and their connection with sense.
Hayden is highly conscious of the aural dimension of language.
(c) What is the function of the title, which is taken from a song in
George and Ira Gershwin’s opera Porgie and Bess?
“Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday”
(a) Discuss the viewpoint of the speakers about the murdered diva.
Discuss the final two lines. Are they at all ironic? Are the
speakers totally surprised?
(b) Discuss the importance of tone throughout the poem.
(c) Discuss the poem’s atmosphere and how elements other than
tone contribute to the black church feeling.
Bibliography
Greenberg, Robert M. “Robert Hayden.” In American Writers: A Collection
of Literary Biographies, Supplement II, Part I, edited by A. Walton
Litz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981, 361–83. Has
biographical, critical, and bibliographical material.
Hayden, Robert. Collected Prose: Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick
Glaysher. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Has
excellent interview material with Hayden about particular poems.
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
Contributing Editor: Janis Stout
Issues
Personal Background: Roethke had extremely ambivalent feelings about his
father, who was managing partner in a large greenhouse operation in
Saginaw, Michigan. He also had problems relating to alcohol addiction and
bipolar disorder, which resulted in periods of hospitalization. All of these
personal tensions are confronted in his poetry.
“Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze”
The three “ancient ladies” preside over processes of growth (both vegetable
and the poet’s own) almost as personifications of natural forces, or even the
three Fates. Their presence, like Mother Nature’s, is somewhat ambiguous;
there is a note of threat in their tickling of the child and in their night
presence. The three women’s vigor and authority should be noted, as well as
their avoidance of limitation by sex-role stereotypes: clearly female (they
wear skirts, they have a special association with the child), they also climb
ladders and stand astride the steam-pipes providing heat in the greenhouse.
“Root Cellar”
“Root Cellar” and “Big Wind” represent the celebrated “greenhouse poems,”
a group characterized by close attention to details evident only to one who
knows this particular world very well—as Roethke did. They are
distinguished from, say, Wordsworth’s nature poems in that they celebrate
equally the natural processes themselves and the human effort and control
involved. They share Wordsworth’s ability to appreciate the humble or
homely elements of nature. Here, in particular, we see Roethke’s wonder at
the sheer life process even when manifested in forms that would ordinarily
seem ugly or repellent.
“Big Wind”
We might say “Big Wind” celebrates the tenacity of human effort in the face
of hostile natural forces, an effort that wrests out of chaos the beauty of the
roses. However, that idea should not be pressed so far as to exclude the
creative force of natural vitality. Nature and human effort join together in
producing roses. The greenhouse itself, shown as a ship running before the
storm, seems almost a living thing.
“The Lost Son”
“The Lost Son” illustrates three major elements in Roethke’s work: surrealistic style; reflection of his own psychological disorders; and mysticism,
his vision of spiritual wholeness as a merging of the individual
consciousness with natural processes and life-forms.
1. “The Flight” is a poem of anxiety about death and loss of identity.
2. “The Return” associates wellness with the greenhouse world of
childhood. The return spoken of is the return of light and heat—of
full heat, since the greenhouses would scarcely have been left
unheated on winter nights. The plants are both an object of the poet’s
close observation and a representation of his life.
“Meditations of an Old Woman”
Probably the most far-reaching question that can be asked of students, but
also the most difficult, is, What difference does it make that the speaker is an
old woman? Old, we can understand; we think of wisdom, experience,
release from the distractions of youth. But why not an old man? One
tempting answer is that our society has typically seen passivity and the
passive virtues (patience, for instance) as feminine.
“Elegy”
Not often anthologized, this funerary tribute approaches a fusion of comedy
with high seriousness. Aunty Tilly is a wonderfully strong, assertive,
independent-minded woman who both fulfills traditional roles (housewife,
cook, nurse, tender of the dead) and transcends them. The comedy emerges
in the last stanza when Aunt Tilly comes “bearing down” on the butcher
who, knowing he has met his match, quails before her indomitability and her
clarity of vision.
Bibliography
Balakian Peter. Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields: The Evolution of His
Poetry (1989).
Kalaidjian, Walter B. Understanding Theodore Roethke (1987).
Seager, Allen. The Glass House (1968).
Stout, Janis P. “Theodore Roethke and the Journey of the Solitary Self.”
Interpretations 16 (1985): 86–93.
Sullivan, Rosemary. Theodore Roethke: The Garden-Master (1975).
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
Contributing Editor: C. K. Doreski
Bishop’s poems are highly accessible and do not present problems for most
mature readers. I have found that more students come to hear the poetry of
Bishop when they commit some of her work to memory. I often challenge
students to find the poetry first and then discuss the theme. This encourages
them to begin to find relationships among form, language, and topic.
Bishop’s voice communicates rather directly to beginning readers of poetry.
What is difficult to convey is the depth of expression and learning evidenced
in these poems. Her work shows not merely experience but wisdom, the
ability to reflect upon one’s life, and that makes some poems difficult for
younger readers.
For younger women readers, Bishop often seems old-fashioned,
fussy, or detached. This perplexed the poet in that she felt that she had lived
her life as an independent woman. This “generation gap” often provides an
interesting class opportunity to talk about historical, cultural, and class
assumptions in literature—and how those issues affect us as readers.
Students are often quite taken by Bishop’s regard for animals. With
the spirit of a Darwinian naturalist, the poet is willing to accord the natural
world intrinsic rights and purposes. The dream-fusion world of the ManMoth provides many students with an opportunity to discover this avenue
into Bishop’s world.
Original Audience
Bishop presents a curious “generational” case in that the circumstances of
her childhood (raised by her maternal grandparents and an aunt) skew some
of her references in favor of an earlier time. The kitchen setting in “Sestina”
(not in this anthology), for example, seems more old-fashioned than Robert
Lowell’s interior scenes in “91 Revere Street.” Otherwise her poems may be
seen as timely—or timeless.
In the British lyric tradition, Bishop, by admission and allusion, draws
heavily from Herbert, Hopkins, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, and Blake.
Most pertinent American contrasts are with her mentor Marianne
Moore (large correspondence at the Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia), her
friends Robert Lowell (correspondence at Houghton Library, Harvard
University; Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie), and May Swenson
(correspondence at Washington University Library, St. Louis).
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
“The Man-Moth”
(a) This is but one of Bishop’s many dream poems. In what ways
does Bishop demonstrate her interest in and reliance upon
surrealism?
(b) How does Bishop attempt to humanize her exile through a
multitude of sensory impressions? Are they effective?
(c) The final stanza addresses the reader. How does Bishop
intensify her creature’s humanity through his ultimate
vulnerability? Are we made to feel like the man-moth?
“Filling Station”
(a) As Bishop describes setting and inhabitants of this “family
filling station,” she deliberately builds upon the initial
observation, “Oh, but it is dirty!” Why dwell upon and develop
this commentary? Does it suggest a missing family member? Is
this station without a feminine presence?
(b) The scale of the poem seems deliberately diminutive. Does this
intensify the feminine quality of the poem? Is this intentional?
(c) The closing stanza returns a sense of order or at least purpose to
this scene. The symmetry of the cans lulls the “high-strung
automobiles” into calmness. With the final line, “Somebody
loves us all,” does Bishop suggest a religious or maternal
caretaker for this family?
Describe the voice and tone in a single poem. The casual humor of
Bishop’s world is often missed by casual readers (obsessed with
travel and loss as themes).
Bishop owes much to her surrealist heritage. Sleep and dream states
animate the worlds of the “Man-Moth” and “Crusoe in England.”
Such an essay would allow students to discover a new topical frame
for discussion of experience, language, and poetic form.
A useful technical assignment would be to discuss Bishop’s reliance
upon simile rather than metaphor as her chief poetic device to link
her world with the reader’s. It says something critical about Bishop’s
belief in the limits of shared knowledge, experience.
Bibliography
Primary Works
North & South, 1946 (Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award); Poems: North &
South—A Cold Spring (Pulitzer Prize, 1956); Questions of Travel, 1965; The
Complete Poems, 1969 (National Book Award); Geography III, 1976; The
Complete Poems, 1927–1979, 1983; The Collected Prose, 1984.
Secondary Works
Candace MacMahon, Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927–1979, 1980;
Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil Estess, Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, 1983;
Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Elizabeth Bishop, 1985; Robert Dale
Parker, The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 1988; Thomas J.
Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, 1988; Bonnie
Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991; Lorrie Goldensohn,
Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, 1992; C. K. Doreski, Elizabeth
Bishop: The Restraints of Language, 1993; Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop:
Life and the Memory of It, 1993.
Robert Lowell, Jr. (1917–1977)
Contributing Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
Lowell’s poetry is more difficult than readers expect, deceptively difficult.
Since many students come to him expecting an accessible poet (after all, he’s
one of those “confessionals”), they sometimes resent having to mine his
poems for the background and the allusive sources they contain. Attention to
an explicative preparation usually helps. “New Critical” methods are very
appropriate.
Issues
The combination of the historical with the personal is one of Lowell’s most
pervasive themes. His illustrious and prominent family (the Lowells) created
a burden for both his psyche and his art. The reader must know history to
read Lowell. The human mind in search, moving with intuitive
understanding (as opposed to a reliance on fact), sometimes succeeding,
sometimes not, is Lowell’s continuing theme.
A range of forms must be studied—Lowell is the most formal of poets, even
toward the end, with the so-called “notebooks.” Studying his intense revision
(hardly a word left unchanged from the original version to the final) and
examining his effort to skew natural language into his highly concentrated
form are both good approaches.
Original Audience
Consider the whole business of the confessional, as Lowell moved from the
historical into his unique blend of the personal and the historical.
Address the issue of location. Boston, the New England area, held
not only Lowell’s history but the country’s.
Compare Lowell’s poetry to that of Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Theodore
Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2001)
Contributing Editor: D. H. Melhem
Brooks’s work is generally accessible. Occasionally, however, and more
likely in some earlier works, like Annie Allen and individual poems like
“Riders to the Blood-red Wrath,” intense linguistic and semantic
compression present minor difficulties.
My Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice can be used as a
guide to her published works. As holds true for most poetry, Brooks’s should
be read aloud. In the process, its power (boosted by alliteration), the
musicality, and the narrative are vivified.
Students seem taken with Brooks’s identity poems like “The Life of
Lincoln West” and the didactic “Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” which was
Hughes’s favorite. The narrative aspect seems to be especially appealing. As
these are not in this anthology, you may wish to recommend them as extra
reading.
Issues
Themes include black pride, black identity and solidarity, black humanism,
and caritas, a maternal vision. Historically, racial discrimination; the civil
rights movement of the fifties; black rebellion of the sixties; a concern with
complacency in the seventies; black leadership.
Brooks was influenced at first by the Harlem Renaissance. Her early work
featured the sonnet and the ballad, and she experimented with adaptations of
conventional meter. Later development of the black arts movement in the
sixties, along with conceptions of a black aesthetic, turned her toward free
verse and an abandonment of the sonnet as inappropriate to the times. She
retained, however, her interest in the ballad—its musicality and
accessibility—and in what she called “verse journalism.”
In the early works: Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Merrill Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Anne
Spencer.
In the later works: Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and again, Hughes.
Bibliography
The most useful books on Brooks are the following:
Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. University
Press of Kentucky, 1987.
Chronologically discusses each major work in a separate chapter;
biographical introduction; biocritical, prosodic, and historical approach;
discusses correspondence with first publisher.
———. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews.
University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
The first of six chapters that offer introductions to and interviews with six
outstanding black poets who bear some relation to or affinity with Brooks
presents a summary of her life and art. Includes a discussion of new work
(The Near- Johannesburg Boy, “Winnie” in Gottschalk and the Grande
Tarantelle), an essay, “The Black Family,” a new poem, and an interview
arranged for the book. This American Book Award–winning work also
features Dudley Randall, Haki R. Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez,
and Amiri Baraka.
Other books include the following:
Bloom, Harold, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House
Publishers, 2001. Essays.
Bolden, B. J. Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the
Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945–1960. Third World Press, 1999.
Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Foreword and Afterword by
D. H. Melhem. University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Biography.
Mootry, M. K. and G. Smith, eds. A Life Distilled. University of
Illinois Press, 1987. Essays.
Shaw, Harry. Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Twayne, 1980. Presents a
thematic approach.
Wright, Stephen G., ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1996. Essays.
The Beat Movement
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)
Teaching Ginsberg requires addressing rampant stereotypes about the beats
and the kind of art they created; that is, the drug culture, homosexuality,
Eastern belief systems, and, most important, the effects of such practices on
the poem.
By showing the students what a standard formalist 1950s poem was,
I have usually been able to keep them focused on the work itself. Ginsberg’s
long-lined, chantlike poems are so responsive to his speech rhythms that
once students hear tapes, they begin to see his rationale for form.
Connections with Walt Whitman’s work are also useful.
Issues
Ginsberg’s dissatisfaction with America during the 1950s prompted his
jeremiads, laments, “Howls.” When his macabre humor could surface, as it
does in “A Supermarket in California,” he shows the balance that clear
vision can create. His idealism about his country marks much of his work,
which is in many ways much less “personal” than it at first seems.
Consider the tradition of American poetry as voice dependent (Whitman and
William Carlos Williams) rather than a text for reading. The highly allusive,
ornate, “learned” poems of T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens have much less
influence on Ginsberg’s work, although he certainly knows a great deal
about poetry. His poems are what he chose to write, and he makes this
choice from a plethora of models. The highly religious influence shapes
much of his work (he once described himself as a Buddhist Jew with
connections to Krishna, Siva, Allah, Coyote, and the Sacred Heart).
Ginsberg was a personal friend of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. It
was largely through Buber’s influence that he gave up drugs.
“Howl,” the first part of which appears here, is one of the most
famous artifacts of the 1950s. Struggling to recover from the McCarthy trials
that spelled doom for anyone charged with difference, the late 1950s was the
edge of both promise and fear. The 1960s, with their recognition of the value
of change and difference, were about to strike every American citizen, but
“Howl” when it was first published in 1956 was still a threatening work. (A
decade later, when a recording of the poet reading the work was played on
radio, people responsible could have lost their jobs.) In alluding to the
experiences of the beats, especially Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met
when both were patients at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute in 1949, the
poem brings into focus a quantity of events unknown to the (polite) literary
world, a more advantaged world.
It also alludes to the travels of William S. Burroughs, whose first
book Junkie (1953) was published through Solomon’s efforts; Herbert E.
Huncke, a con artist and junkie from New York; and Neal Cassady, a Denver
hipster whose travels with Jack Kerouac were re-created in the latter’s On
the Road (1957). As a collective chronicle, the work draws on a number of
people’s experiences—all united in being marginal, offensive, and generally
threatening to most academics and students.
Original Audience
Ginsberg’s work can usefully be approached as protest as well as lament.
Connections with the writings of racial minorities can help define his own
Jewish rhythms.
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
Theodore Roethke
Gary Snyder
Denise Levertov
Robert Creeley
Langston Hughes
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Etheridge Knight
Pedro Pietri
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969)
Teaching material for Jack Kerouac is available on The Heath Anthology
web site. (To access the site, please go to the Houghton Mifflin college home
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)
Contributing Editor: Helen Barolini
Ferlinghetti’s work is immediately accessible and appealing, and these
qualities should be emphasized. He uses everyday language to articulate his
themes. A problem could be his critique of social problems in America;
conservative students may find him too sharply satiric about their image of
this country. You might note that although Ferlinghetti articulates the
“outsider” view of society, he also espouses hope for the future; for instance,
poems like “Popular Manifest” (not in this anthology) give a sense of vision
and expectation.
Tape recordings of Ferlinghetti reading can be effective.
Issues
Ferlinghetti is a political activist and his poetical career spans and reflects
thirty years of U.S. political history.
His personal voice brings poetry back to the people. He has done this not
only as a poet, but as a publisher, editor, translator, and discoverer of new
talent.
Significant Form, Style, and Artistic Conventions
Ferlinghetti has been prominently identified with the beat movement of the
1950s. It is important to consider the beat movement as an ongoing part of
American bohemianism, and to contrast it, for example, with the expatriate
movement of post–World War I.
The hip vocabulary can well be examined, and the beat experience of
alienation can be connected with other marginals in the society.
Original Audience
The work of Ferlinghetti can be placed in the specific social context of the
beat movement in the fifties—beats were the anarchists in a time of general
postwar conformism.
Ferlinghetti can certainly be compared with his fellow beats, like Allen
Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and contrasted with other poets of the time—
for instance, the more mannered Wallace Stevens. There is also much to
compare, stylistically, with e. e. cummings.
1.
2.
3.
With this particular poet, the most effective approach is to plunge
right into the work. He elicits the questions.
Discuss the San Francisco Renaissance, which centered around
Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore.
What is the counterculture in America?
Bibliography
General
Charters, Samuel. Some Poems/Poets: Studies in American Underground
Poetry Since 1945. Oyez, 1971.
The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised. New York: Grove,
1982.
Particular
Cherkovski, Neeli. Ferlinghetti: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1979.
Hopkins, Crale D. “The Poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Reconsideration.” Italian Americana 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 59–76.
Kherdian, David. Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Fresno:
Giligia Press, 1967.
Silesky, Barry. Ferlinghetti, the Artist in His Time. New York: Warner
Books, 1990.
Skau, Michael. “Constantly Risking Absurdity”: Essays on the Writings
of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1989.
Smith, Larry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet-at-Large. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1983.
Vestere, Richard. “Ferlinghetti: Rebirth of a Beat Poet.” Identity Magazine
(March 1977): 42–44.
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
Contributing Editor: Thomas R. Whitaker
“Hart Crane”
Dedicated to a friend of Crane who became a friend of Creeley, this is the
opening poem in For Love. Is it a negative portrait or a sympathetic study of
difficulties central to Creeley’s own career? Certainly it contains many
leitmotifs of Creeley’s poetry: stuttering, isolations, incompletion, selfconscious ineptness, the difficulty of utterance, the need for friends, the
confrontations of a broken world.
“I Know a Man”
The colloquial anecdote as parable? How does the stammering lineation
complicate the swift utterance? Why should the shift in speakers occur with
such ambiguous punctuation—a comma splice? According to Creeley,
“drive” is said not by the friend but by the speaker.
“For Love”
The closing poem in For Love, this is informed by the qualities attributed to
Crane in the volume’s opening poem. “For Love” is one of many poems to
Bobbie—wife, companion, muse, and mother of children—that wrestle with
the nature of love, the difficulty of utterance, and a mass of conflicting
feelings: doubt, faith, despair, surprise, self-criticism, gratitude, relief. The
poem is a remarkable enactment of a complex and moment-by-moment
honesty.
“Words”
This poem drives yet further inward to the ambiguous point where an
inarticulate self engages an imperfectly grasped language. Not the wife or
muse but “words” seem now the objects of direct address, the poem’s “you.”
Nevertheless, the poem’s detailed phrases and its movement through anxious
blockage toward an ambiguously blessed release strongly suggest a love
poem.
“America”
Though seldom an explicitly political poet, Creeley here brings his sardonic
tone and his belief in utterance as our most intimate identity to bear on the
question: What has happened to the America that Walt Whitman celebrated?
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Whitman
had said in his Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass. And he had often
spoken of the “words” belonging to that poem, as in “One’s-Self I Sing” and
in the reflections on “the People” in Democratic Vistas.
“America” modulates those concerns into Creeley’s own more
quizzical language. We may read it as a dark response, a century later, to
Whitman’s “Long, Too Long America” in Drum-Taps. For Creeley’s more
extended response to Whitman, see his Whitman: Selected Poems.
In “Projective Verse” Charles Olson quotes Creeley’s remark that “Form is
never more than an extension of content.” Creeley liked, as an implicit
definition of form, a Blakean aphorism that he learned from Slater Brown:
“Fire delights in its form.” His central statement of open poetics, involving
“a content which cannot be anticipated,” is “I’m Given to Write Poems” (A
Quick Graph, pp. 61–72).
It is useful to know that, when reading his poetry aloud, Creeley
always indicates line-ends by means of very brief pauses. The resultant
stammer—quite unlike the effect of Williams’s reading—is integral to
Creeley’s style, which involves a pervasive sense of wryly humorous or
painful groping for the next line.
William Carlos Williams told Robert Creeley, “You have the subtlest feeling
for the measure I have encountered anywhere except in the verses of Ezra
Pound.” For Creeley’s relation to Williams, see his essays in A Quick Graph
and Paul Mariani, “Robert Creeley,” in A Usable Past (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1984). For his relation to Pound, see “A Note on
Ezra Pound” (A Quick Graph), and for his sustained and mutually valuable
relation to Charles Olson, see again A Quick Graph.
Perhaps the class would like to compare “Hart Crane” with Robert
Lowell’s “Words for Hart Crane” in Life Studies. Two views of Crane, two
modes of portraiture, and two historically important styles of mid-twentiethcentury American verse; these plus “The Broken Tower” itself would make a
fascinating unit of study.
Charles Olson (1910–1970)
It will be most practical to approach Olson after some detailed work with
poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Despite
many stylistic similarities, Olson’s poetic “enactment” dictates a different
kind of progression and a different use of literary and other allusions. The
teacher might suggest that the formalist concept of a “speaker” or
“protagonist” (a character in a poetic drama outside of which the poem’s
maker is imagined to stand) might be replaced by the poet himself in the act
of writing (a self-reflexive Charles Olson in the drama of making this poem).
Although Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Williams’s
Paterson are partially amenable to this approach, Olson commits himself to
it more fully in both shorter and longer forms.
His abstract style, his refusal to commit himself to the modernist
“image,” may also be a difficulty. The student can be reminded that all
speech, all thought, even an “image,” is the result of an abstractive process.
Olson characteristically works with syntax and conceptual reference that are
“in process”—often fragmentary, self-revising, incremental—as he struggles
to “say” what is adequate to his present (and always changing) moment.
Comparisons with Robert Creeley’s often abstract and stammering forward
motion may be illuminating.
Those interested in Olson as a teacher and as a collaborator with
other poets and artists should consult Letters for Origin and Mayan Letters,
and also Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community
(1972), and Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (1987)
which are richly informative. Duberman also quotes a comment by Merce
Cunningham on Olson as a dancer, which may suggest one way of
approaching Olson’s poetic style: “I enjoyed him; . . . he was something like
a light walrus” (p. 359). For Olson’s own appreciation of Cunningham as a
dancer, see the poem “Merce of Egypt,” which is a meditation on man-themaker that might be compared to “For Sappho, Back.” For the extraordinary
intensity and range of Olson’s reading, see Ralph Maud, Charles Olson’s
Reading: A Biography (1996).
“The Kingfishers”
It may be useful for the instructor to have worked through this poem with the
help of a commentator, such as Sherman Paul, Thomas Merrill or Ralph
Maud. Students can then be encouraged to approach the poem as a
meditation on the need for change, and the will to change—as of 1949 but
with contemporary applications. The poet sees the need to move beyond
Eliot and Pound, beyond the irony and despair of The Waste Land and the
modern inferno of The Cantos, without overlooking the cultural crisis to
which they allude. What sources of vitality does he find amid the decay?
What suggestions for personal and cultural renewal? And for a new poetic
practice? Can we understand this poem on the model of elliptical diary
notations by someone who is working toward a statement of position? What
are the stages of its progress?
Students with an interest in the poem’s philosophical implications
may wish to explore Plutarch’s “The E at Delphi” or G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus:
The Cosmic Fragments. Students wondering how “feedback” may relate to
social and poetic processes should turn to Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics or
The Human Use of Human Beings. Of great interest in that direction is also
the work of Gregory Bateson: see Steps to an Ecology of Mind (the chapter
on “Cybernetic Explanation”) and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.
“For Sappho, Back”
In some respects more traditional in form and subject than the other Olson
poems included here, “For Sappho, Back” might be a useful introduction to
Olson’s style for students not at ease with allusive modernism. How does the
poem expand the tribute to a specific woman-poet so that it becomes a
meditation on woman, nature, and poetry? What specific qualities of
Sappho’s style does it allude to? Does Sappho become here a Muse figure or
Nature Herself ? D. H. Lawrence has said in Etruscan Places (which Olson
admired) that the Etruscan priest sought an “act of pure attention” directed
inward. “To him the blood was the red stream of consciousness itself.” As
Olson wrote to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, “I am alone again working
down to the word where it lies in the blood. I continually find myself
reaching back and down in order to make sense out of now and to lead
ahead.” (See Clark, Charles Olson, p. 95.) Does this help us with “Back” in
the title and the use of “blood” later? Clark suggests that, on one level, this is
a personal love poem, taken by its recipient, Frances Boldereff, to be a “very
accurate portrait” of herself (p. 171). Olson often chose to incorporate in
such love poems allusions to his wife Constance; can we find such clues
here? How, finally, do we relate the historical, personal, and archetypal
concerns of this poem?
Robert von Hallberg (Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art, pp. 34–38)
offers suggestions for stylistic analysis of the use of fragmentary and selfrevising syntax in this poem.
“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”
Students might usefully compare this poem to Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn
Bridge”; both are invocations and statements of subject at the outset of
modern “personal epics.” One might also consult the preface to Williams’s
Paterson. What are the social issues in each case? What dominant images
are established? What relations does Olson suggest between love and form?
How do images gradually accrue additional meanings as the meditation
proceeds? Does it help to know that this was happening in the process of
composition—and that in an earlier draft “next second,” was “next/second”?
(See Clark, Charles Olson, p. 166.)
“Maximus, to himself ”
As a self-assessment, this poem might usefully be compared with Creeley’s
“For Love.” Both have the air of spontaneous meditation; both deal largely
in abstractions; both are sharply self-critical. To what degree is the form of
each an “extension of content”? How, in each, does a seemingly unplanned
meditation assume the form of a coherent monologue, moving through a
problem toward its momentary resolution?
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
“Riprap”
As Snyder tells us in his first volume, riprap is “a cobble of stone laid on
steep, slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains.” In Myths &
Texts (p. 43), he calls poetry “a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics.”
This poem may suggest the “objectivism” of William Carlos Williams—“No
ideas but in things”—and yet it finally evokes an infinite, ever-changing
system of worlds and thoughts. Such idealism, of course, also enters
Williams’s Paterson. Central to the poetics of both Williams and Snyder are
strategies that enable particulars to evoke a pattern and so provide a link with
the universal. What strategies can the class find here? Some poems for
comparison: “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” and “Piute
Creek” in Riprap, and “For Nothing” in Turtle Island—all concerned to
relate “thing” and “mind” or “form” and “emptiness.”
“Vapor Trails”
How does this poem relate aesthetic patterns, natural patterns, and the
patterns of human violence? Is the poem finally a lament over such
violence? Or a discovery of its beauty? Or a resignation to its naturalness?
Or all or none of these? Can the class trace the shifting tone of the
meditation from beginning to end?
This poem, too, has affinities with Williams’s work. See, for
example, such studies of symmetry and craft as “On Gay Wallpaper” and
“Fine Work with Pitch and Copper.” Does the ironic use of “design” at the
end of “Vapor Trails” obliquely recall the concerns of Robert Frost’s
“Design”?
“Wave”
This poem, like others in Regarding Wave, links various manifestations of
energy—inorganic, organic, sexual, linguistic, mental—through images and
etymologies that evoke a cosmic wave, motion, or dance. Snyder’s riprap, a
human construction that enables a mental ascent, seems now to have yielded
more fully to the perception of patterns inherent in natural process, patterns
in which we dancingly participate.
Wave: wife. As that analogy develops, does the poem suggest that
nature is our muse and that the energy of all sentience and all cosmic process
is fundamentally sexual?
Would the class enjoy some visual analogies to “the dancing grain of
things/of my mind”? If so, you might look at the photographs and
calligraphy in Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane
English (New York: Random House, 1972).
“It Was When”
This reverie over moments when Snyder’s son Kai might have been
conceived is both a love poem to his wife Masa and a celebration of the
“grace” manifest in their coming together. Its imagery, cadences, and
reverence for vital processes strongly recall the poetry of D. H. Lawrence.
The class might like to make comparisons with Lawrence’s “Gloire de
Dijon” and perhaps other poems in Look! We Have Come Through!
“It Was When” is a densely woven pattern of alliteration and assonance.
How do those sound effects cooperate with the poem’s cadences and its
meanings?
You may want to consult other poems in Regarding Wave that continue
Snyder’s meditation on his marriage and Kai’s birth: “The Bed in the Sky,”
“Kai, Today,” and “Not Leaving the House.”
Snyder often plays variations on the imagist mode in which Ezra Pound and
William Carlos Williams did much of their earlier work. D. H. Lawrence’s
love poems and animal poems are also important antecedents, as are
Kenneth Rexroth’s meditations amid Western landscapes and his translations
from Japanese poetry.
Central to the poetics of both Williams and Snyder are strategies that
enable particulars to evoke a pattern and so provide a link with the universal.
Bibliography
For Snyder’s later career, including his essays and his ecological activism,
see John Halper, ed., Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life (1991) and Patrick
D. Murphy, A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder
(2000).
Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
Contributing Editor: Joan F. Hallisey
With an adequate introduction to her life and works, Denise Levertov is not
a difficult author. Levertov can best be made accessible to students when
they are familiar with the poet’s own prose reflections on poetry, the role of
the poet, and “notes” on organic form. You might prepare an introduction to
her work by making reference to her quite precise discussion of these themes
in The Poet in the World (1973); Light Up the Cave (1982); and New and
Selected Essays (1992).
Consider using tapes of Levertov reading her own poetry. The most
recent cassette, “The Acolyte” (Watershed), contains a fine sampling from
her earlier poetry through Oblique Prayers. Encourage students to listen both
to her poetry readings and interviews and to incorporate information from
them in class or seminar discussions and presentations or as material for
research papers. When students are doing a class presentation, strongly urge
them to be certain that their classmates have copies of the poems they will be
discussing.
Students respond favorably to Levertov’s conviction that the poet
writes more than “[she] knows.” They also respond positively to the fact that
an American woman “engaged” poet has spoken out strongly on women’s
rights, peace and justice issues, race, and other questions on human rights.
Students may ask you if Levertov is discouraged in the face of so
much darkness and disaster evident in the late twentieth century. This
presents a good opportunity to have the students examine “Writing in the
Dark” and “The May Mornings” (Candles in Babylon, 1982) and her essay
“Poetry, Prophecy, Survival” (New and Selected Essays, 1992).
Issues
Levertov’s work is concerned with several dimensions of the human
experience: love, motherhood, nature, war, the nuclear arms race, mysticism,
poetry, and the role of the poet. If you are teaching a women’s literature
course or an upper-level course focusing on a few writers, several of these
themes might be examined. In a survey course, you might concentrate on
three themes that include both historical and personal issues: poetry, the role
of the poet, and her interest in humanitarian politics.
Levertov in “Some Notes on Organic Form” tells the reader that during the
writing of a poem the various elements of the poet’s being are in communion
with one another and heightened. She believes that ear and eye, intellect and
passion, interrelate more subtly than at other times, and she regards the
poet’s “checking for accuracy,” for precision of language that must take
place throughout the writing not as a “matter of one element supervising the
others but of intuitive interaction between all the elements involved” (The
Poet in the World, p. 9).
Like Wordsworth and Emerson, Levertov sees content and form as
being in a state of dynamic interaction. She sees rhyme, echo, reiteration as
serving not only to knit the elements of an experience “but also as being the
means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or
circling of perception can be transmuted into language, apperceived” (Ibid.,
p. 9).
You might point out that as an artist who is “obstinately precise”
about her craft, Levertov pays close attention to etymologies as she searches
for the right words, the right image, the right arrangement of the lines on the
page. It will be helpful for students to be able to recognize other poetic
techniques that Levertov uses in her poetry: enjambment, color, contrast, and
even the pun to sustain conflict and ambiguity. Levertov will sometimes
make use of the juxtaposition of key words and line breaks.
Levertov does not consider herself a member of any particular
school.
Original Audience
Levertov has said, on several occasions, that she never has readers in mind
when she is writing a poem. She believes that a poem has to be not merely
addressed to a person or a problem out there; but must come from in here,
the inner being of the poet, and it must also address something in here.
It is important to share Levertov’s ideas with the students when you
discuss audience. One might stress the universality of some themes: familial
and cultural heritage, poetry, and the role of the poet/prophet in a “time of
terror.” There is a “timeless” kind of relevance for these themes, and they
need not be confined to any one age.
There is enough evidence to suggest that a fruitful comparison might be
made between several of Muriel Rukeyser’s finest poems (“Akiba,” “Kathe
Kollwitz” [Speed of Darkness, 1968], “Searching/Not Searching” [Breaking
Open, 1973]) and some of Levertov’s poems on comparable themes.
1.
2.
(a) What kinds of feelings do you have about the Holocaust? About
nuclear war?
(b) What do you think the role of the poet should be today? Do you
think she or he should speak out about political or social issues?
Why? Why not?
(a) Several of Levertov’s poems can be used for a writing sample
and subsequent discussion at the beginning of the course. Brief
poems that students respond strongly to are: “The Broken
Sandal” (Relearning the Alphabet), “Variation on a Theme from
Rilke” (Breathing the Water), and “The Batterers” and “Eye
Mask” (Evening Train, 1992).
(b) One might give a short assignment to compare the themes, tone,
and imagery of Levertov’s “The Broken Sandal” with Adrienne
Rich’s “Prospective Immigrants—Please Note.”
(c) Examine several of Levertov’s poems on poetry and the role of
the poet in light of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for the “true”
poet in several of his essays, most notably in “The Poet,”
“Poetry and the Imagination,” and “The American Scholar.”
Bibliography
Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World (1973); Light Up the Cave (1982);
and New and Selected Essays (1992) are essential primary source materials
for a deeper understanding of the poems included in the text.
“The Sense of Pilgrimage” essay in The Poet in the World and
“Beatrice Levertoff ” in Light Up the Cave offer valuable background
material for teaching “Illustrious Ancestors.”
Levertov has acknowledged the significant influence of Rilke on her
poetry and poetics throughout her career, and several of her recent
“Variation on a Theme from Rilke” poems will be enriched by Edward
Zlotkowski’s insightful essay “Levertov and Rilke: A Sense of Aesthetics”
in Twentieth Century Literature, Fall 1992.
Audrey Rodger’s Denise Levertov’s Poetry of Engagement will be
helpful in discussing Levertov’s understanding of the role of the poet and her
poetry of engagement.
Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
Contributing Editor: David Bergman
Frank O’Hara’s works look so effortless, spontaneous, so stitched from his
daily life, that students may forget just how hard it is to make things look
easy. It is important to stress the ways the poems are drawn from his life,
more than a laundry list of “I do this, I do that.” For example, in “The Day
Lady Died,” the precise and banal details of his train schedule and the
presents he is bringing set the stage for the memory of Billie Holiday, a
memory that seems to exist out of time. It is Holiday who breaks through the
hustle and bustle of his life and has captured through her art—her voice—
something nearly eternal. Although she had “stopped breathing” in reality, in
his memory of her it is the audience who is dead and she is the one most
alive.
O’Hara’s connection to abstract expressionism is well established. It
might be helpful to show the work of Mike Goldberg, Willem De Kooning,
or Grace Hartigan. You might want to discuss the relationship between
action painting and O’Hara’s aesthetic, especially as developed in “Why I
Am Not a Painter.”
O’Hara studied music, and for quite a time believed he would
become a composer. He worked with Ned Rorem and was a friend of Virgil
Thomson. (The Rorem/O’Hara collaboration is available on CD [PHCD
116].) Invite students to read the poems aloud. One discovers a subtle music
in them. O’Hara diverges from modernist poets because of his emphasis on
voice rather than on image. For all of his interest in painting, it is the
immediacy of O’Hara’s voice that is the most striking part of his poetry.
Some teachers are afraid to address the homosexual content of his poems.
I have discovered that addressing the issue as just one more subject reduces
the students’ discomfort. If students remain uncomfortable, the best position
to state is, “We are all grown-ups here. We must be ready to confront
attitudes and positions we both share and do not share.”
Issues
Like John Ashbery, O’Hara’s friend and fellow Harvard alumnus, O’Hara is
always concerned with time and mutability. These questions of time spawn
several subthemes: (1) the relationship of art to time (can art take us out of
time?); (2) the weakness of the body, its susceptibility to disease, death, and
pain; (3) the fleetingness of emotions, particularly love; (4) the pressure of
friends and the difficulties of maintaining the bonds of friendship.
Openness is a key word for O’Hara. He wants his poems and his love to
be open. We can discuss open poetic forms, open relationships, openness to
experience, a willingness to court vulgarity and sentimentality. But openness
makes one vulnerable. O’Hara is haunted by this sense of vulnerability to
outside enemies and forces. In some ways this mirrors the American psyche
of the Cold War—its sense of strength, its desire to be an open society, and
its fears—frequently irrational—of enemy attack.
O’Hara’s work is free verse, but as the footnote suggests, “Poem” echoes
Shakespeare’s sonnet “When in disgrace to fortune and men’s eyes.” It
might be useful to look at how the form of the sonnet, although not copied,
haunts the structure of this poem. O’Hara’s line breaks look arbitrary, but
they often are extremely effective.
O’Hara’s work is often compared to John Ashbery’s. One can see their wit,
humor, and desire to incorporate things from daily life into their work. But
whereas these poems are open to the reader, Ashbery’s poems often are
hermetic. Allen Ginsberg was also one of O’Hara’s friends. The homoerotic
world of “A Supermarket in California” compares with O’Hara’s “Poem.”
O’Hara disliked Robert Lowell’s poetry. Lowell’s formalism and highly
wrought poetic surface contrasts strongly with O’Hara’s work of the same
period.
Students may be encouraged to try their own I-do-this-I-do-that poems and
see why the details in O’Hara’s add up to something much more than a list
of appointments. What are the similarities and differences between poetry
and the other arts? How autobiographical should a poem be? How distanced
from the poet’s life does a poem have to be to affect a reader? Do the names
of so many of O’Hara’s personal friends keep the poem from communicating
to you as a reader, or does this specificity—even if you don’t know who
these people are exactly—make the experience seem more immediate?
When does gossip become art? How does O’Hara’s expression of
homosexual love differ from heterosexual love? Or does it?
James Wright (1927–1980)
Contributing Editor: George S. Lensing
The poems of Wright, on the surface, seem simple and accessible. Yet they
also seem distinctively “poetic.” Students might be asked to discuss how and
why the poems are both simple and poetic. This could easily lead to a
discussion of images in the poems, and examples from any of the four
included here might be used.
Another strategy might be to consider Wright as a social poet
addressing American society in the 1960s and 1970s. Ask the students what
impression of America during those decades emerges from the poems. How,
from the poems in the text, can you justify Wright’s identity with those
individuals outside middle-class American society? Who are these
individuals? What do they have in common? What is the nature of their
appeal to Wright?
Issues
A typical theme explored in Wright’s poetry is rural America versus the
modern urban America of the middle class with its wealth, political power,
and control over the oppressed. This theme was particularly relevant in the
America of the 1960s and 1970s when Wright wrote. America was involved
in the Vietnam War, and Wright sees that involvement as a kind of national
illness.
Both a theme and a technique is Wright’s movement inward and
within the self, often through a rural or small-town setting. Images in
particular lead him inwardly toward moments of sudden self-revelation:
(“Flayed without hope,/I held the man for nothing in my arms” in “Saint
Judas,” or “I have wasted my life” in “Lying in a Hammock at William
Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”
The “how” of a poem by Wright is intrinsic to the “what.” Here, the participation of Wright in the “deep image” movement is important. “Lying in a
Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” is a good
example to illustrate that movement. The poet is located at the farm of a
friend; he is recumbent in a hammock. His mind is not operating in the usual
logical and rational way but is dreamlike and given to random associations.
The boundaries between human and nonhuman life are being erased
through various kinds of personifications: the butterfly is “asleep” and
“Blowing like a leaf.” Cowbells “follow one another.” Droppings “Blaze
up.” Images define the poet’s free play of mind as he moves from the sight
of the butterfly, to the sound of the cowbells, to the droppings of the horses,
to the darkening of the evening, to the flying chicken hawk. The timing of
the images and their cumulative play upon each other are crucial to this
process. They are images of beauty, of metamorphosis in some cases, of
things in their proper and natural locations. (The chicken hawk is “looking
for home” and will undoubtedly find it.) However, the title tells us that the
poet is not in his usual location, but the farm of a friend. Now he is
profoundly drawn in to the images that surround him. The poem suddenly
“leaps” to its conclusion: “I have wasted my life.” That leaping occurs
among the images that surround him and that startle him abruptly into a
knowledge of himself. But the connection is not made through narrative
exposition; it is left to the reader’s own association and recognition of the
images and their timing. The process has not been rational but almost
surreal. This poem and other poems of the deep image depend upon the
successful “leaps” and their effect upon the reader. How much does Wright’s
self-revelation, for example, become our own?
Original Audience
Poetry and poetry readings were very popular during the 1960s in America,
especially on campuses where the resistance to the Vietnam War was also
often centered. Wright gave many public readings at American colleges. His
reputation grew steadily over the course of his career and was shortened by
his death from cancer at the age of fifty-two.
An important influence upon Wright was the poet Robert Bly. (See The
Heath Anthology headnote for Wright.) But other poets, like William
Stafford, Louis Simpson, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, were also
writing in a similar mode; they knew and influenced each other. Wright also
translated poetry by figures like Georg Trakl, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda,
Juan Ramon Jimenez, and others. Their poems became important influences
on his own work. An important magazine owned and edited by Bly—called
the Fifties (during that decade), the Sixties, and for a brief time, the
Seventies—published Wright’s poems and translations as well as those of
Bly and other figures of the deep image school.
1.
2.
3.
How is the figure of Judas, the betrayer of Christ, presented in the
early sonnet “Saint Judas”? How does Judas anticipate and prefigure
other outsiders in Wright’s poems—especially little Crow in “A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion
in Minnesota, 1862”?
How is American society during the 1960s and 1970 depicted in
Wright’s poetry?
How do the various images in the poems and their “leaping” relation
to one another lead to the conclusions usually expressed in the
poems’ last sentence?
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
Students usually begin with the fact that Plath committed suicide and then
read her death as some kind of “warning” to talented, ambitious women
writers. (The recent biography by Stevenson only supports this view,
unfortunately.) What must be done is to get to the text, in each case, and read
for nuance of meaning—humor, anger, poignance, intellectual tour de force.
Running parallel with this sense of Plath as some inhuman persona is a
fearful acknowledgment that women who have ambition are not quite
normal. Plath receives a very gender-based reading. A good corrective is to
talk about people who have tendencies toward depression, a situation that
affects men as well as women.
Focus on the text and ready information about the possible
biographical influence on that text. Often, however, the influences are
largely literary—Medea is as close a persona for some of the late poems as
Plath herself—T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W. S. Merwin, W. B. Yeats, etc.
Criticism is just now starting to mine these rich areas. Some attention to the
late 1950s and early 1960s is also helpful: seeing the poetry and The Bell Jar
as the same kind of breakthrough into the expression of women’s anger as
Betty Friedan’s or Simone de Beauvoir’s is useful.
Hearing Plath read from her own late work is effective: She has an
unusual, almost strident voice, and the humor and gutsiness of the 1962
poems come across well. Caedmon has one recording that has many of the
late poems backed with Plath’s interview with Peter Orr for the BBC, taped
on October 30, 1962 (many of the poems she reads were written just that
week, or shortly before). The PBS Voices and Visions Plath segment is also
fairly accurate and effective.
As mentioned above, the fact of Plath’s suicide seems primary in
many students’ minds. Partly because many of them have read, or know of,
The Bell Jar, it is hard to erase the image of the tormented woman, ill at ease
in her world. But once that issue is cleared, and her writing is seen as a
means of keeping her alive, perhaps the study of that writing becomes more
important to students: It seems to have a less than esoteric “meaning.”
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, Personal Issues
Themes include women’s place in American culture (even though Plath
lived the last three years in England, thinking wrongly that she had more
freedom in England to be a writer); what women can attempt; how coerced
they were by social norms (i.e., to date, marry, have children, be a helpmeet,
support charities); the weight society places on women—to be the only
support of children, to earn livings (Plath’s life, echoing her mother’s very
difficult one, with little money and two children for whom she wanted the
best of opportunities); the need for superhuman talent, endurance, and
resourcefulness in every woman’s life.
Versatility of form (tercet, villanelle, many shapes of organic form, syllabics), use of rhyme (and its variations, near rhyme, slant rhyme,
assonance), word choice (mixed vocabularies)—Plath must be studied as an
expert, compelling poet, whose influence on the contemporary poetry
scene—poems written by men as well as women—has been inestimable.
Without prejudicing readers, the teacher must consider what “confessional”
poetry is: the use of seemingly “real” experience, experience that often is a
supreme fiction rather than personal biography; a means of making art less
remote from life by using what might be life experience as its text.
Unfortunately, as long as only women poets or poets with abnormal
psychiatric histories are considered “confessional,” the term is going to be
ineffective for a meaningful study of contemporary poetry.
Original Audience
Although most of Plath’s best poems were written in the early 1960s, the
important point to be made is that today’s readers find her work immediate.
Her expression of distrust of society, her anger at the positions talented
women were asked to take in that society, were healthful (and rare) during
the early 1960s, so she became a kind of voice of the times in the same way
Ernest Hemingway expressed the mood of the 1920s. But while much of
Hemingway’s work seems dated to today’s students (at least his ethical and
moral stances toward life), Plath’s writing has gained currency.
The most striking comparison can be made between the early work of Anne
Sexton and Plath (Plath learned a lot from Sexton), and to a lesser extent, the
poems of Theodore Roethke. W. D. Snodgrass’s long poem “Heart’s
Needle” was an important catalyst for both Sexton and Plath, as was some of
Robert Lowell’s work. If earlier Plath poems are used, Wallace Stevens and
T. S. Eliot are key. And, in moderation, Ted Hughes’s early work can be
useful—especially the animal and archaic tones and images.
Bibliography
Susan Van Dyne’s essays on the manuscripts are invaluable (see Centennial
Review, Summer 1988). See also the Massachusetts Review essay, collected
in Wagner’s Sylvia Plath: Critical Essays (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984) and
Van Dyne’s 1993 book from the University of North Carolina Press.
Wagner’s Routledge collection, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage
(1988) includes a number of helpful reviews.
Linda Bundtzen’s Plath’s Incarnations (University of Michigan
Press, 1983), Steven Axelrod’s 1990 Sylvia Plath, The Wound and the Cure
of Wounds, along with the Wagner-Martin biography of Plath, are useful.
See also Linda Wagner-Martin’s Plath’s The Bell Jar, A Novel of the Fifties
(1992).
Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
Contributing Editor: Diana Hume George
Anne Sexton’s poetry teaches superbly. It is accessible, challenging, richly
textured, and culturally resonant. Her work is equally appropriate for use in
American literature, women’s studies, and poetry courses. The selections in
this text represent many of the diverse subjects and directions of her work.
Three problems tend to recur in teaching Sexton; all are interrelated.
First, the “confessional school” context is troublesome because that subgenre
in American poetry is both misnamed and easily misunderstood; Sexton has
been the subject of inordinately negative commentary as the first prominent
woman poet writing in this mode. Second, contemporary readers, despite the
feminist movement, often have difficulty dealing with Sexton’s explicitly
bodily and female subject matter and imagery. Finally, readers often find her
poetry depressing, especially the poems that deal with suicide, death, and
mental illness.
If the course emphasizes historical context, a sympathetic and
knowledgeable explanation of resistance to the confessional mode is helpful.
(Ironically, if historical context is not important to presentation of the
material, I suggest not mentioning it at all.) Academic and public reactions
to the women’s movement, even though Sexton did not deliberately style
herself as a feminist poet, will help to make students understand the depth
and extent of her cultural and poetic transgressions. The third problem is
most troubling for teaching Sexton; teachers might emphasize the necessity
for literature to confront and deal with controversial and uncomfortable
themes such as suicide, mortality, madness. A discussion of the dangers of
equating creativity and emotional illness might be helpful, even necessary,
for some students. It’s also important to demonstrate that Sexton wrote many
poems of celebration, as well as of mourning.
Students often want to know how and why Sexton killed herself.
They want to disapprove, yet they are often fascinated. I recommend one of
two approaches. Either avoid the whole thing by not mentioning her suicide
and by directing students toward the poems and away from Sexton’s life; or
engage the issue directly, in which case you need to allow some time to
make thoughtful responses and guide a useful discussion that will illuminate
more than one life and death.
Issues
A balanced presentation of Sexton would include mention of her major
themes, most of which are touched upon in the selection of poems here:
religious quest, transformation and dismantling of myth, the meanings of
gender, inheritance and legacy, the search for fathers, mother-daughter
relationships, sexual anxiety, madness and suicide, issues of female identity.
The problem of placement in the confessional school can be turned into an
advantage by emphasizing Sexton’s groundbreaking innovations in style and
subject matter. Sexton’s early poetry was preoccupied with form and
technique; she could write in tightly constrained metrical forms, as
demonstrated in To Bedlam and Part Way Back and All My Pretty Ones. She
wrote in free verse during the middle and late phases of her poetic career.
Most important is her gift for unique imagery, often centering on the body or
the household.
Original Audience
Many of Sexton’s readers have been women, and she has perhaps a special
appeal for female readers because of her domestic imagery. She also found a
wide readership among people who have experienced emotional illness or
depression. But Sexton’s appeal is wider than a specialist audience. She is
exceptionally accessible, writes in deliberately colloquial style, and her
diversity and range are such that she appeals to students from different
backgrounds.
Among other confessionals, she can be discussed in context with Robert
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass. Among women
poets, she shares concerns of subject and style with Adrienne Rich, Denise
Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Alicia Ostriker, and, in a different way, Maxine
Kumin. It’s also appropriate to mention her similarities to Emily Dickinson,
another female New England poet who wrote in unconventional ways about
personal subjects, religion, and mortality. Because she was a religious poet
whose work is part of the questing tradition, she might be usefully compared
with John Donne and George Herbert. Since many of her poems are spoken
from the perspective of a child speaker, the standard literary tradition for
comparative purposes can include Blake and Wordsworth, Vaughan and
Traherne. Extra-literary texts that illuminate her work include sections of
psychoanalytic theory, especially Freudian.
1.
2.
I try to avoid giving students a predisposition to Sexton, and instead
discuss difficulties and questions as they arise in discussion.
(a) Examine the range of Sexton’s subject matter and poetic style.
(b) Pick a theme in a Sexton poem and trace it in other poems she
wrote.
(c) In what sense is Sexton a religious poet? A heretic?
(d) Examine several surprising, unconventional images from several
Sexton poems. What makes them surprising? Successful?
(e) If Sexton is confessional, what is it that she is confessing?
(f) Select another poet with whom Sexton can be compared, such as
a confessional poet, a feminist poet, a religious poet, and discuss
similarities and differences in their perspectives.
(g) What are some of the possible uses for poetry that speaks from
the perspective of madness or of suicide?
Bibliography
Excellent articles on Sexton are most readily available in recent and
forthcoming anthologies of criticism. Instructors can select articles that bear
most directly on their concerns.
Sexton: Selected Criticism, edited by Diana Hume George,
University of Illinois Press, 1988, includes many previously published
articles from diverse sources in addition to new criticism, as does Ann
Sexton: Telling the Tale, edited by Steven E. Colburn, University of
Michigan Press, 1988.
Original Essays on Anne Sexton, edited by Frances Bixler,
University of Central Arkansas Press, 1988, contains many new and
previously unpublished selections.
Critical Essays on Anne Sexton, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin,
G. K. Hall, 1989, includes a number of reviews as well as essays and
reminiscences.
J. D. McClatchy’s Anne Sexton: The Poet and Her Critics, Indiana
University Press, 1978, is the original critical collection.
Diane Wood Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton: A Biography was
published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991.
Critics who specialize in Sexton or who have written major essays on
her, whose works will be found in most or all of the above anthologies,
include Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume
George, Estella Lauter, Suzanne Juhasz, and Linda Wagner-Martin.
New Communities,
New Identities, New Energies
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (1930–1965)
Contributing Editor: Jeanne-Marie A. Miller
The primary problem that might be encountered is the student’s lack of
familiarity with black American drama. The images of blacks on the early
American stage reflected their place in American life. Dramatic expression,
exclusively by white authors, made of them contented, faithful slaves or
servants, tragic figures of mixed blood, and comic characters. The comic
figures were dominant.
Despite prejudice and racism, black playwrights were known in the
American theater as early as 1823 when a play entitled King Shotaway,
written by Mr. Brown (whose first name is uncertain) was produced by the
African Grove Theater and Company. Also in the nineteenth century,
William Wells Brown, a former slave, published The Escape; or, A Leap for
Freedom (1858), and William E. Easton’s play Dessalines was produced in
Chicago (1893). From the beginning, the concern of most black playwrights
has been the realistic depiction of the black experience.
During the twentieth century, growing out of the increased interest of
American writers in folk material, came a renewed interest among white
playwrights in blacks as source material for drama. Consider, for instance,
Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920). The 1920s, the period of the
Harlem Renaissance, also introduced the first serious (that is, nonmusical)
dramas by black playwrights on Broadway—for example, Willis
Richardson’s A Chip Woman’s Fortune (1923) and Garland Anderson’s
Appearances (1925).
One of the most popular plays on Broadway during the 1930s was
The Green Pastures (1930), a black folk fable written by Marc Connelly, a
white playwright. As the Depression worsened, plays that protested against
the social and economic conditions that sorely afflicted people were
produced. Paul Peters and George Sklar’s Stevedore (1934), for example,
centers on a black militant hero who defends his rights as a man and a
worker on the New Orleans docks.
Though blacks were gaining some experience on Broadway, in
community theaters, and in drama groups in black institutions of higher
learning, it was the Federal Theater Project, which grew out of the
Depression and provided work for unemployed theater people, that gave a
major boost to blacks in theater. The post–World War II years found some
white playwrights concentrating on the tense situation that existed when
black soldiers, who had been in Europe fighting for democracy, returned to a
segregated America. For instance, Strange Fruit (1945), a drama adapted
from a novel by its author Lillian Smith and her sister Esther, makes a bitter
commentary on racial segregation, intolerance, and injustice in this country.
Two dramas by black playwrights reached Broadway in the 1940s:
white playwright Paul Green and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941) and
Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ (1947). The play Native Son is a dramatization
of Wright’s powerful novel about Bigger Thomas and the corrosive effects
of American society on him. Our Lan’ concerns a group of newly freed
slaves who search for economic independence and security during the latter
days of the Civil War and the early Reconstruction period.
Ironically, as the heightened period of the civil rights movement of
the 1950s produced a plethora of plays by black writers affected by the mood
of the country, white playwrights who employed black themes and
characters returned to the traditional images of blacks. Consider, for
instance, Berenice Sadie Brown, a black cook, in Carson McCullers’s A
Member of the Wedding (1950) and the black slave from Barbados who
confesses to being a witch in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) (the
setting is the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692).
During the 1950s, Off Broadway teemed with plays by black writers:
William Branch’s Medal for Willie (1951) and In Splendid Error (1955);
Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955) and Loften Mitchell’s Land
Beyond the River (1957), for example. At the end of the decade, twentyeight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry made her debut on Broadway with A
Raisin in the Sun (1959). She was the first black woman to have a play
produced on Broadway and the first black playwright and youngest
playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The
production was significant in other ways. Not only were the playwright and
the cast, except for one, black, but so were the director and some of the
investors. Blacks came out in large numbers to see this award-winning work
that truthfully depicts a black working-class family who triumphs over the
debilitating conditions of the ghetto. With Raisin American drama and
blacks reached a new milestone. The play has been translated into over thirty
languages and produced in many countries. In 1961 it became a film and in
1973 a Tony Award–winning musical.
Issues
Some of the major themes of her works are as follows: the slave system and
its effect on Americans; the deprivation and injustice suffered by blacks
because of racism; moral choices; deferred dreams of black Americans; selfdetermination of African countries; ability to control one’s own destiny;
negative effects of voguish movements; and relationships between men and
women. The major historical and personal issues that should be emphasized
are slavery and the Civil War; contrasting portraits of slavery; the civil rights
movement of the 1950s and 1960s, whose antecedents were in the black
protest and revolt of slaves, and feminism.
Hansberry followed the trend of realism. In her dramas she wished to
illustrate character. As an artist she believed that all people had stature and
that there were no dramatically uninteresting people. She searched for the
extraordinary, the uniqueness in the ordinary. She embraced the social nature
of art, and she dissected personality as it interacted with society. Her
dramatic style included the use of colloquial speech, a sense of the rhythm of
language, the use of symbolism, and departures from realistic speech into the
lyrical.
Original Audience
Hansberry wrote for the general theater audience.
At the center of The Member of the Wedding (1950), a drama by Carson
McCullers, a white writer, is a black cook who holds together the white
family for whom she works. Unlike McCullers’s play, in which the black
cook’s family is hardly ever seen, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
dramatizes the story of a black domestic and her family. It is a story told
from inside the race.
Some study questions that students might find useful are as follows:
1.
(a) What is Hansberry’s background?
(b) What is her philosophy of art?
(c) How does she move from the particular to the universal in her
play?
(d) How does she use language in her play?
Paper topics that have proved useful are as follows:
2.
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
The role of women in Hansberry’s play
Family relationships
Language in Hansberry’s play
Love between man and woman
Relationships between women and men
Bibliography
The introductions to Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine
Hansberry, written by Julius Lester for the 1972 edition and by Margaret B.
Wilkerson for the 1983 edition, as well as the critical backgrounds by Robert
Nemiroff in each of these editions.
The collection of essays and the bibliography that appear in the
special issue of Freedomways (vol. 19, no. 4, 1979) entitled “Lorraine
Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light.”
The first two chapters on Hansberry’s life in Anne Cheney’s book
Lorraine Hansberry, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
A film entitled Lorraine Hansberry: The Black Experience in the
Creation of Drama, Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities, 1976.
Edward Albee (b. 1928)
Contributing Editor: John Alberti
One-act plays like The Sandbox work well in the classroom. Their brevity
not only allows for detailed analysis of the text, but as dramatic works they
invite the use of performance as a pedagogical strategy. Asking groups of
students to prepare and put on their own productions of The Sandbox,
whether live in the classroom or on videotape, transforms literary
interpretation from an academic exercise to a pragmatic consideration of
how to stage the play, as student actor/directors must make discussion about
how lines are read, what body language is to be used, and even how to
construct a set given the constraints of both Albee’s script directions and the
limitations of the classroom. If several student groups put together their own
versions of the play, the class can then discuss and write on the different
approaches taken and what these approaches say about the way theater
works and the variability of the interpretive act.
A performative approach can help students deal with the difficulties
of The Sandbox. While the diction of the characters in the play is accessible,
almost clichéd, the very poverty of their powers of expression can provoke
questions about how we are supposed to understand the motivations and
feelings of the characters. This contrast between the banality of the language
of Mommy and Daddy and the extremity of their plans (murder) is, of
course, one of the themes of the play itself, and in deciding how to portray
the characters students will have to make decisions about just how to deliver
their lines, decisions they can then describe and reflect on in written assignments. Similarly the meta-theatrical nature of the play, with Grandma’s and
Mommy’s frequent references to the staging of the play itself and the
identification of the Young Man as an actor (“playing” the Angel of Death),
extends the theme of the poverty of interpersonal communication to the
ritual of theater itself in modern, media-driven society (the Young Man is
identified not just as an actor, but an actor from Southern California, with
implications of the film industry).
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
Contributing Editor: Keith D. Miller
Issues
Context for “I Have a Dream”
Unfortunately, many students remain blissfully unaware of the horrific racial
inequities that King decried in “I Have a Dream.” In 1963, southern states
featured not only separate black and white schools, churches, and
neighborhoods, but also separate black and white restrooms, drinking
fountains, hotels, motels, restaurants, cafes, golf courses, libraries, elevators,
and cemeteries. African Americans were also systematically denied the right
to vote. In addition, southern whites could commit crimes against blacks—
including murder—with little or no fear of punishment. The system of racial
division was enshrined in southern custom and law. Racism also conditioned
life in the North. Although segregationist practices directly violated the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, the federal
government exerted little or no effort to enforce these amendments. Leading
politicians—including John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon
Johnson—advocated racial equality only when pressured by King, James
Farmer, John Lewis, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other nonviolent
activists who fostered social disruption in the pursuit of equal rights.
Fortunately black students are often knowledgeable about the civil rights era.
Content for “I Have a Dream”
“I Have a Dream” has been misconstrued and sentimentalized by some who
focus only on the dream. The first half of the speech does not portray an
American dream but rather catalogs an American nightmare. In the manner
of Old Testament prophets and Frederick Douglass, King excoriated a nation
that espoused equality while forcing blacks onto “a lonely island of poverty
in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Context for “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
By the time of King’s final speech, the heyday of the civil rights movement
was over. Large riots in major cities and the divisive issue of the Vietnam
War had shattered the liberal consensus for civil rights and created an
atmosphere of crisis.
Content for “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
King sought to energize his listeners on behalf of the garbage workers’
strike. He analyzed the Parable of the Good Samaritan, identifying the
Memphis strikers with the roadside victim and urging his listeners to act the
part of the Good Samaritan. He also arranged the strike in a historical
sequence that features the Exodus, the cultural glory of Greece and Rome,
the Reformation, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Great Depression,
and—late in his address—the lunch counter sit-ins for civil rights and his
major crusades in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma. By placing the struggle
in Memphis in the company of epochal events and his own greatest
achievements (neglecting to mention his more recent, unsuccessful campaign
in Chicago), King elevated the strike from a local event to a significant act in
the entire Western drama. Here he focused much more on economic inequity
than he did in “I Have a Dream.”
African-American Folk Pulpit: “I Have a Dream”
Important in reaching King’s enormous and diverse audience were the
resources of black folk preaching, including biblical quotations; call-andresponse interaction with listeners; a calm-to-storm delivery that begins in a
professorial manner before swinging gradually and rhythmically to a
dramatic climax; schemes of parallelism, especially anaphora (e.g., “I have a
dream that . . .”); and clusters of light and dark metaphors. AfricanAmerican students can frequently inform their classmates about these timehonored characteristics of the African-American folk pulpit that animate
King’s address.
African-American Folk Pulpit: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
Elements of the folk pulpit that enliven “Mountaintop” include the
explication of a parable; call-and-response interaction; calm-to-storm
delivery; the apocalyptic tone of much evangelistic, revivalist preaching
(“The nation is stick. Trouble is in the land”); and the updating of a
prominent analogy (or typology) of black Christians equating blacks with
Old Testament Hebrews and slave-owners with the Egyptian Pharaoh. King
labeled his opposition as Pharaoh and urged solidarity among Pharaoh’s
oppressed and segregated slaves. Concluding “Mountaintop,” King boldly
likened himself to Moses and foretold his own death prior to
blacks’/Hebrews’ entry into the Promised Land.
Familiar Symbolism: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
As with “I Have a Dream,” King defined his appeal by explaining
nonviolence and by applying standard patriotic and religious symbols. His
protest became an exercise of the First Amendment; an attempt to rebuild a
New Memphis akin to a New Jerusalem; a later chapter in the book of
Exodus; and in his last sentence, a merging of his vision with that of “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Original Audience
King spoke “I Have a Dream” to an immediate crowd of 250,000 followers
who had rallied from around the nation in a March on Washington held in
front of the Lincoln Memorial. His audience also consisted of millions
across the nation and the world via radio and television.
King’s audience in “Mountaintop” consisted of 2,000 or so ardent
and predominantly black followers gathered to support the cause of striking
garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee.
Old Testament prophets, Frederick Douglass’s “The Fourth of July” oration,
John Lewis’s speech preceding “I Have a Dream,” and speeches by Malcolm X.
“I Have a Dream” harnesses the voices of Lincoln, Jefferson,
Shakespeare, Amos, Isaiah, Jesus, Handel’s Messiah, “America the
Beautiful,” a slave spiritual, and African-American preachers.
King never fully acknowledged the importance of female civil rights
leaders. See JoAnn Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women
Who Started It, ed. David Garrow, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1987.
Bibliography
For a valuable analysis of King’s 1963 address, see Alexandra Alvarez,
“Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’: The Speech Event as Metaphor,”
Journal of Black Studies 18 (1988): 337–57.
For background on King, see James Cone, “Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Black Theology—Black Church,” Theology Today 40 (1984): 409–20;
James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1991; David Garrow, Bearing the Cross, New York: Morrow, 1986; Keith
D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and Its Sources, New York: Free Press, 1992.
Playing records or audiovideo tapes of King’s speeches substantially
facilitates discussion of the oral dynamics of the black pulpit that nurtured
King and shaped his discourse. The PBS series “Eyes on the Prize” is
especially useful.
Malcolm X (1925–1965)
Contributing Editor: Keith D. Miller
Malcolm X is one of the most controversial figures one could study. Most
students, recognizing his enormous impact on recent American culture, will
revel in discussions—or passionate debates—about his merits. Those who
have read the popular Autobiography of Malcolm X—or seen the Spike Lee
movie based on it—will argue that Malcolm X was foolish to be duped by
Elijah Muhammad or brilliant to recognize that he had been duped; that
Malcolm X reached a beautiful, universal vision at the end of his life or that
he did not; that he was unforgivably sexist or that his sexism was typical of
the period.
Students will invariably attempt to relate Malcolm X to issues in race
relations, including those on their own campuses.
The first need is to direct the students, at the very least initially, to
focus on “The Ballot or the Bullet” instead of jumping to an ultimate verdict
on the Autobiography, on Malcolm X, or even on race relations in America.
Issues
Malcolm X used the same major rhetorical strategy in “The Ballot or the
Bullet” that he employed in other speeches and in the Autobiography. He
attacked the well-established, sometimes unexamined tendency of African
Americans to identify with white America, passionately insisting that blacks
identify instead with Africans, their slave ancestors, and with each other. In
that vein, he declares, “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the twenty-two
million black people who are victims of Americanism.” Speaking to
American blacks, he explains, “You’re nothing but Africans. Nothing but
Africans.”
The use of “X” as a replacement for a given last name is part of his
rhetorical strategy. Malcolm X urged all African Americans to reject their
last names, which were those of slave-owners, replacing them with “X” to
stand for the lost African names of their ancestors. Thousands belonging to
the Nation of Islam adopted this practice. Because the “X” substituted for
last names, it defined members of the Nation as a single “family” of brothers
and sisters, aunts and uncles. The use of “X” also bracketed the names of
other African Americans, implicitly declaring that all of them were
mistakenly identifying with whites, their slave masters.
The issue of violence loomed large in Malcolm X’s rhetoric. In this
speech and elsewhere, he refused to repudiate violence, realizing that most
of the white Americans who applauded Martin Luther King’s nonviolence
would not react nonviolently themselves in the face of brutality. By refusing
to embrace nonviolence, Malcolm X made King look more palatable than he
would otherwise have appeared.
By the time of “The Ballot or the Bullet,” race dominated America’s
domestic agenda. Millions watched police dogs tear into young AfricanAmerican children protesting for integration in Birmingham. Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson responded by proposing major civil rights legislation,
which passed in the summer following “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
Though many believed that such an initiative signified racial
progress, Malcolm X disagreed. Not only did conservative whites fail blacks,
he maintained, so did “all these white liberals” who were supposedly allies.
As he explains in this speech, many white liberals belonged to the
Democratic party, which was often dominated by southern segregationists.
Unlike white liberals and the NAACP, Malcolm X did not want blacks to
integrate white hotels. He wanted blacks to own the hotels.
Malcolm X’s own bleak childhood and criminal young adulthood
helped shape his radical views and gave him insight into the lives of his
primary audience—hundreds of thousands of African Americans trapped in
the ghettos of America’s largest cities.
Malcolm X’s jeremiads owe something to the appeals of Marcus Garvey, an
earlier leader who instilled racial pride, and to Malcolm X’s own father, a
Garvey disciple. Even though Malcolm X advocated Islam instead of
Christianity, his style and impact derive in part from the role of the black
Protestant preacher—a revered patriarchal figure free to denounce from the
pulpit whomever he saw fit.
Original Audience
Malcolm X delivered “The Ballot or the Bullet” to a predominantly AfricanAmerican meeting in Cleveland of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
which was shifting from nonviolent protest to Malcolm X–like black
nationalism. Helping provoke this shift were speeches like this one, which
was received enthusiastically.
Students can compare this talk to those that Malcolm X gave to
largely white listeners. See, for example, the addresses collected in Malcolm
X Speaks at Harvard (1991), edited by Archie Epps.
Comparing the language of King and Malcolm X can be helpful. In some
ways their analyses of the evils institutionalized in American life are quite
similar. Though Malcolm X’s blowtorch denunciations are harsher than
King’s, the main difference lies in King’s willingness to grant whites a way
around the guilt that King so skillfully evoked. In King’s rhetorical world,
whites—even ardent segregationists—could listen, change their ways, and
learn to practice love and democracy. King claimed that his methods could
actually win opponents over to his view.
During most of his career Malcolm X gave whites no such break.
Instead he demanded separation from whites. He regarded integration not as
a goal, but as a sentimental fiction. Toward the end of his life, he seemed
more accepting of some whites, but his evolving vision was not entirely
clear.
As James Cone explains, toward the end of their lives, King and
Malcolm X were, in some ways, thinking alike. Both realized that, without
economic muscle, masses of blacks would never prosper, not matter how
much this nation espoused the theory of integration. In “I’ve Been to the
Mountaintop,” King stressed the need for economic self-help and racial
solidarity. For both leaders, the divisions of economic class loomed as
important as—and were inseparable from—the issue of race. Most
Americans have never accepted this view.
Who was Malcolm X’s primary audience? If it was primarily African
Americans, why did he address whites as well and the white news media?
Why did he (co)author a best-seller often read by and, in some ways, aimed
at whites? Why did he criticize whites in such an uncompromising fashion
instead of flattering his audience as speakers usually do? Why did he define
grounds of disagreement with whites instead of grounds of agreement, which
orators usually seek and are taught to seek? Why did he also often criticize
blacks who heard him—sometimes calling them “brainwashed”—and why
did they applaud him when he did so?
If Malcolm X was sincere in rejecting nonviolence, why did he
characteristically refuse to carry a gun and always, in fact, practice
nonviolence? If blacks were brutally oppressed, as he claimed, and if
retaliation was justified, as he claimed, why did he never lead such
retaliation? Since he gave fiery speeches but never organized either
nonviolent or violent protests against whites, was he sincere? Or was he a
“paper tiger”? Did he mean to be taken literally? If not, how did he mean to
be taken?
Bibliography
Millions continue to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), coauthored by Alex Haley. I strongly recommend Remembering Malcolm
(1992) by Malcolm X’s assistant minister Benjamin Karim, who shows a
sensitive leader inside the Muslim mosque and reveals information available
nowhere else.
No thoroughly reliable, full-scale biography of Malcolm X exists.
Many details about his life (especially before his public career) remain
unknown. In Malcolm (1991), a detailed, provocative biography, Bruce
Perry claimed that the Autobiography features blatant exaggerations and
outright falsehoods. But some of Perry’s own claims seem unsupportable.
Joe Wood compiled Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (1992), which contains
helpful essays by Cornel West, Arnold Rampersad, John Edgar Wideman,
Patricia Hill Collins, and others. In Martin and Malcolm and America
(1991), James Cone usefully compares and contrasts King and Malcolm X,
as do John Lucaites and Celeste Condit in “Reconstructing Equality:
Culturetypal and Counter-Cultural Rhetorics in the Martyred Black Vision.”
Communication Monographs 57 (1990): 5–24.
Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
Contributing Editor: Allan Chavkin
Focus on specific parts of the story by asking a series of
specific questions. This particular story can be approached on
two different levels, for it is both a realistic depiction of a
relief worker’s dedicated attempt to search for an unemployed,
crippled black man in the slums of Depression Chicago in
order to deliver a welfare check and a symbolic quest to
discover the relationship between reality and appearances.
My approach to the story is generally conventional—
asking questions and prompting class discussion on key issues.
Another possible approach would be to play all or part of an
excellent unabridged audio-recording of the story by Books on
Tape, P.O. Box 7900, Newport Beach, CA 92658-7900, and
discuss the interpretation that the Books-on-Tape reader gives
to the story.
Students often respond actively to the following issues
raised by “Looking for Mr. Green”:
1. Money as a formative influence on the creation of
identity.
2. The problem of the noncompetitive in a highly
competitive society.
3. The clash between idealism and cynical “realism,”
between the noble idealist and the cynic.
4. The quest of a stubborn idealist in an irrational world.
5. Racism and stereotyping.
Issues
Historical Issues and Themes: How does society help the
downtrodden (in this story an unemployed crippled black man)
in bad economic times (e.g., the Depression)? The story also
examines the problems of race, class, and gender. Other issues
that the class might focus upon are: the plight of the
noncompetitive in a capitalistic, highly competitive society;
how money influences character; the alienation of the urban
black man.
Personal Issues and Themes: How does an idealistic
humanist (i.e., the typical Bellow hero) reconcile noble ideas
with the harsh facts of the human condition? Is man essentially
a victim of his situation or is he the master of his fate? What is
Bellow suggesting about the problem of human suffering and
evil? The relationship of the individual to his society? The
relationship of appearance to reality? The clash between the
human need to order and make sense of life according to moral
principles and life’s amoral disorder, discontinuity,
irrationality, and mystery?
The story can be discussed as a bildungsroman; as a parable,
as a symbolic quest; as a realistic depiction of the Depression
and of the alienation of the urban black man.
The story might be compared with some works by such black
writers as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison,
or any other writers who have written about the Depression
(e.g., John Steinbeck). The story could be compared to some
stories by such naturalistic writers as Theodore Dreiser and
Jack London who are also concerned with the free will versus
determinism theme. An interesting comparison would be with
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote on the formative influence of
money on the self. The idea that illusion is necessary for the
survival of self in a harsh, predatory world is a central theme
of modern American drama (Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams, and Arthur Miller), and this story might be
compared to the most important modern American plays.
Bellow’s depiction of women might be compared to that of
other writers.
1. (a) What is the purpose in the story of Grebe’s
supervisor Raynor? What is Bellow’s attitude toward
Raynor’s cynical “wisdom”? Is concern for the
individual anachronistic? For philosophical studies?
(b) What is the purpose of the encounter with the Italian
grocer who presents a hellish vision of the city with
its chaotic masses of suffering humanity?
(c) The old man Field offers this view of money—
“Nothing is black where it shines and the only place
you see black is where it ain’t shining.” Discuss.
What do you think of the scheme for creating black
millionaires? Why does Bellow include this scheme
in the story?
(d) What is the purpose of the Staika incident in the
story? Raynor sees her as embodying “the
destructive force” that will “submerge everybody in
time,” including “nations and governments.” In
contrast, Grebe sees her as “the life force.” Who is
closer to the truth?
(e) The word “sun” and sun imagery are repeated
throughout the story. Discuss.
2. (a) Discuss the theme of appearance versus reality.
(b) Bellow ends the story with Grebe’s encounter with
the drunken, naked black woman, who may be
another embodiment of the spirit of Staika. Why
does Bellow conclude the story this way? Has Grebe
failed or succeeded? Is he deceiving himself?
(c) David Demarest comments: “Grebe’s stubborn
idealism is nothing less than the basic human need to
construct the world according to intelligent, moral
principles.” Discuss.
(d) Believing that “Looking for Mr. Green” needs to be
seen “as one of the great short stories of our time,”
Eusebio Rodrigues argues that the Old Testament
flavors it. This story is “a modern dramatization of
Ecclesiastes.” Discuss.
Bibliography
Chavkin, Allan. “The Problem of Suffering in the Fiction of
Saul Bellow.”
Comparative Literature Studies 21
(Summer 1984): 161–74. Provides
an overview
of Bellow’s work and analyzes key influences on the
fiction.
Demarest, David. “The Theme of Discontinuity in Saul
Bellow’s Fiction:
‘Looking for Mr. Green’ and
‘A Father-to-be.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 6
(Winter 1969): 175–86. Reprinted in Small Planets.
Friedrich, Marianne M. Character and Narration in the Short
Fiction of
Saul Bellow. New York: Peter Lang, 1995,
47–57.
Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham:
Duke University
Press, 1984, 287–89.
Kiernan, Robert F. Saul Bellow. New York: Continuum, 1988,
121–24.
Marovitz, Sanford. “Back to the Beginning: A Late Look at
Bellow’s Early
Stories.” Small Planets: Saul Bellow
and the Art of Short Fiction. Ed.
Gloria Cronin
and Gerhard Bach. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan
State University Press, 2000, 10–12.
Opdahl, Keith Michael. The Novels of Saul Bellow. University
Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967,
100–03.
Rodrigues, Eusebio L. “Koheleth in Chicago: The Quest for
the Real in
‘Looking for Mr. Green.’ ” Studies in Short
Fiction 11 (Fall 1974):
387–93.
Web Sites
http://english.byu.edu/cronin/saulb/journal.html
http://www.almaz.com/nobel/literature/1976.html
http://www.nobel.se/laureates/literature-1976-press.html
Bernard Malamud (1914–1986)
Contributing Editor: Evelyn Avery
Jewish in style and character types, Bernard Malamud’s fiction
appeals to a broad range of students who appreciate the
author’s warmth, ironic humor, and memorable characters.
Above all, they find his blend of the universal and the
particular appealing and unique.
A writer who uses fantasy and history, who creates
tragic and comic characters, who can write realistically and
metaphorically, Malamud will challenge and delight students
of varied backgrounds. Occasionally, “Yiddish” expressions or
Jewish ritual will have to be explained, but, for the most part,
meaning will be derived from context.
Since the effects of suffering are central to Malamud’s
fiction, students should learn that his Jews symbolize all
victims and that his characters cannot be easily categorized as
heroes or villains.
Issues
Writing in the last third of the twentieth century, Malamud was
aware of social problems: rootlessness, infidelity, abuse,
divorce, and more, but he believes in love as redemptive and
sacrifice as uplifting. Often, success depends on cooperation
between antagonists. In “The Magic Barrel,” the matchmaker
worries about his “fallen” daughter, while the daughter and the
rabbinic student are drawn together by their need for love and
salvation.
If Malamud’s readers are sometimes disappointed by
ambiguous or unhappy endings, they are often reassured about
the existence of decency in a corrupt world. Malamud’s
guarded optimism reflects several influences. He cites
American authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, as
guides to moral and spiritual struggles. Like them, Malamud
holds individuals responsible for their behavior. He also
admires Russian writers, Fyodor Dostoyevski and Anton
Chekhov, for their vibrant portrayal of the self versus society.
Although he does not mention other Jewish writers as
influences, he concedes “a common fund of Jewish experience
and possibly an interest in the ethical approach.”
In interviews, Malamud credits his hardworking
“Yiddish” parents and their Eastern European immigrant
generation with providing models of morality, but he
emphasizes that humanity is his subject, and that he uses Jews
to communicate the universal just as William Faulkner created
a universe from a corner of the American South.
Despite his universality or perhaps because of it,
Malamud resembles a number of American Jewish authors,
including earlier twentieth-century writers, such as Abraham
Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry Roth, as well as post–
World War II authors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul
Bellow, and Philip Roth. Because Jewish fiction can reflect
life’s uncertainties and absurdities, it has broad appeal to
contemporary readers, who applaud the attempt of ordinary
people to determine their fate. Such themes, however, are
evident in the non-Jewish literature that Malamud recognized
when he described himself, in a 1975 interview, as “an
American . . . a Jew, and . . . a writer for all men.”
His universality, however, is rooted in distinctive
character types, settings, and details. Thus, the “schlemiel,” a
common type in Eastern European Yiddish literature, appears
in some American Jewish fiction. Although at times a victim
of back luck, the “schlemiel” compounds his problems by
choosing wrongly. Yakov Bok (in The Fixer), fleeing his
Jewish identity, Morris Bober (in The Assistant), attempting to
burn his store down, and Leo Finkle (in “The Magic Barrel”),
insisting that his future wife be young and beautiful, learn to
revise their values, reject assimilation, materialism, and
conformity, and embrace sacrifice and spirituality. Trapped in
depressing, even dangerous settings, in cramped, deteriorating
stores, suffocating apartments, condemned buildings, in a
nation, Russia, where Jews are at risk everywhere, Malamud’s
characters are both archetypal Jews and suffering humanity.
Malamud’s awareness of Jewish pain is best portrayed in The
Fixer, a novel of extreme anti-Semitism in Tzarist Russia,
which for many critics evokes the Holocaust.
Although a serious writer, Malamud uses humor to
underscore the preposterous, to highlight grief, and to instruct
readers. Thus Frank Alpine (in The Assistant) tumbles into the
grocer’s grave, Seymour Levin (in A New Life) lectures with
his pants unzippered, and Yakov Bok (in The Fixer) rescues an
anti-Semite whose gratitude will later lead to Bok’s
persecution. If Malamud’s fiction produces sorrow, it also
provokes laughter, albeit nervous laughter.
Original Audience
A best-selling, critically acclaimed author, Bernard Malamud,
like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth, earned success
with the publication of his early Jewish works, The Magic
Barrel (a collection of short stories) and The Assistant in the
late 1950s. Although the American Jewish literary renaissance
peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, writers like Malamud continue
to be read and enjoyed. In fact his reputation is steadily
growing as students are introduced to his works. Moreover, the
general interest in ethnicity draws readers to Jewish literature,
where they discover that Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, and Singer,
to name a few, speak to all sensitive, intelligent readers.
As indicated earlier, Malamud’s fiction may be compared and
contrasted with works by certain European, American, and
Jewish authors. Like Fyodor Dostoyevski’s characters,
Malamud’s protagonists are tormented, guilt-ridden, and
paranoiac. Their suffering recalls Crime and Punishment and
Notes from the Underground as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
and Henry James’s psychological tales. While Malamud has
been identified as an American Jewish writer, his work can be
differentiated from Saul Bellow’s (considered more cerebral)
and from Philip Roth’s (judged more satiric). Perhaps the best
of his old world stories resemble those of Isaac Bashevis
Singer, whose work attempts to reconcile the old world and the
new.
1. A variety of questions can be posed about Malamud’s
fiction. Is Malamud, for example, a Jewish writer or a
writer who happens to be Jewish? Since “The Magic
Barrel” includes a rabbinic student and a matchmaker,
how universal is the story? Does the story have a happy
ending? What happens? Is this tale representative of the
author’s works?
2. More ambitious assignments can analyze literary
influences on Malamud, his style in comparison to other
Jewish writers, or male-female relationships; or possibly
an imaginative option such as rewriting the story’s
conclusion.
Bibliography
Since Malamud’s death in 1986, his reputation continues to
grow. With the establishment of the Bernard Malamud Society
and the publication of a newsletter, Malamudian scholars are
kept apprised of research and conferences. For further
information contact Dr. Evelyn Avery at Towson State
University, Towson, Maryland, 21204; or Dr. Lawrence
Lasher, English Department, University of Maryland,
Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, 21228.
Grace Paley (b. 1922)
Contributing Editor: Rose Yalow Kamel
The challenge in teaching “The Expensive Moment” lies in the
fact that many conservative students define family values in
direct contrast with the middle-aged Faith Asbury. Her
character is a redefinition of that term; she is a secular
humanist who is unabashedly sexual, and who has a
relationship with her children that encourages them to argue,
confront, and engage with her, a single parent, as an equal.
Furthermore, younger students not only unfamiliar with this
story’s context—the aftermath of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution—but ignorant about our government’s
confrontations with its youth in the 1960s and 1970s, may find
it difficult to understand why Faith mourns Rachel, her
friend’s daughter who went underground as a result of an
“expensive moment” of choice to bomb military plants and
prisons housing radical activists like Rachel herself.
I would therefore (1) encourage discussion and journal
writing about the delicate balance that single mothers face
maintaining their own personhood amidst political and
personal biases that marginalize them; (2) expose students to
other Paley stories told from Faith Asbury’s first-person point
of view (for example, “A Conversation With My Father,”
“Friends,” “Ruthie and Edie”), that depict this eponymous
maternal narrator in her youth and middle age as receptive to
change, yet consistent in advocating a green and sane world
where children can live out their lives; (3) invite guest
speakers familiar with the cultural context of the 1960s and
1970s; and (4) show political documentaries questioning
establishment values, for example, “Letters from Vietnam,”
footage about the Kent State disaster juxtaposed with the
Tiananmen Square massacre. As sophisticated media users,
students will be better able to see the interrelatedness of
national/international generational conflict.
Issues
Paley’s is a multicultural perspective, historically aware of the
great waves of immigration that peopled the vibrant New York
neighborhoods she evokes so well. Woven into the texture of
her fiction are the problems of grassroots working-class
mothers who as urban, leftist Jews link playground politics
with global conflict. Moreover, Paley is always aware that
female sexuality is a source of literary creativity but never
separates the craft of literature from the personal and political
contexts in which gender conflicts arise.
Overarching is Paley’s womanism, maternal and
comradely rather than self-reflexive. It is that womanism that,
despite the difference in their cultural backgrounds, links Faith
with Xie Feng, newly arrived from mainland China to visit
New York’s teeming Vesey Street. Of an age, both women
understand patriarchy, history, and the need to fight for a
future to endure their loss of lovers, husbands, and especially,
beloved children.
Paley uses a stylistic collage—fragments and ellipses, a
merging of past and present tense—that conveys a sense of
wholeness in which setting, character, and point of view
coalesce and render with absolute fidelity a small urban world.
Tonal irony as well as a near-perfect ear for dialogue make
Paley a writer’s writer.
Structurally, Paley’s stories resemble women’s diary
writing— fragmented, fact-focused, immersed in the
transitory, seemingly disconnected aspects of daily life that
define women’s lives.
Original Audience
Paley’s reading audience for her earlier stories about growing
up as a second-generation immigrant child (“The Loudest
Voice,” for example) was cosmopolitan, college-educated, and
attuned to literary experimentation. Because the audience was
not as responsive to political feminism as today’s readers,
Paley was considered a seamless stylist.
Some thematic comparison and contrast can be made with
Tillie Olsen, whose ethnic and politically activist background
is similar to Paley’s. Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and Tell
Me a Riddle involve class and intergenerational conflicts; in
fact, in Olsen’s novella, feisty, elderly Jews, like Paley’s
parents, hold on to the secular humanism that they brought
with them to America. But Olsen uses women’s sexuality
more sparingly, making it a problem of gender, rather than
physical urgency for women. Furthermore, Olsen’s lush,
elegiac style differs from Paley’s deft use of irony, humor,
economy, earthiness. Another writer reminiscent of Paley in
her depiction of the parent-child conflict and women-bonding
in a fluid and changing world is Amy Tan, whose novel The
Joy Luck Club has bits of dialogue and irony similar to
Paley’s, though Tan’s humor is more life-affirming.
1. (a) Keep a journal focusing on the importance of place
in your life. To what extent does place influence
identity?
(b) Write a first-person narrative focusing on your
memory of exploring an experience or discovering
an idea markedly different from those of your
parents.
2. Compare the neighborhood settings in two other Grace
Paley stories, “An Interest in Life” and “The LongDistance Runner.” Discuss the way settings in these
stories make the first-person narrator feel integrated or
marginal in her community.
3. Keep a collection of tapes or photograph albums
focusing on intergenerational ties as well as conflicts.
Bibliography
Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives.
Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990.
Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction.
Boston:
Twayne, 1990.
Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
Contributing Editor: Tresa Grauer
This is a hard story to read and some students may be reluctant
to “analyze” it if their first response is emotional. At the same
time, others may not have the background to understand the
story’s events. Students need to understand that the historical
context of “The Shawl” is the systematic destruction of
European Jewry during the Second World War. They may ask:
What do we mean when we talk about the Holocaust? When
was it? What happened? Those students with some historical
knowledge may find sharing the knowledge with the others to
be one way to begin talking about “The Shawl.” You might
also ask them to point out the clues within the story that helped
them to know where they were. Consider, for example, “the
march,” or “the roll-call arena,” or the “ash-stippled wind.”
You may find that some students will want to
universalize the exper-ience of Jews during the Holocaust—to
see it as one among many different kinds of human
tragedies—in order to discuss it in terms that they are familiar
with and can better understand. And/or they may want to argue
that the experience was completely unique and thus cannot
happen again. You might consider talking about what’s at
stake for them in these arguments. For example, is it less
frightening if we say that the Holocaust was unique? If we can
contain it within our imagination, does it make it less horrible
or horrifying? It’s difficult to talk about why or how the
Holocaust “happened,” and students will realize that the issues
that come up around trying to make sense of it are those that
historians and fiction writers are confronting as well.
Students often want to judge Stella for taking Magda’s
shawl. While it’s important to talk about why she might have
done this, it’s also important to realize that the story points
insistently—thematically and stylistically—to the fact that we
cannot make moral judgments about behavior in the camps.
The standards of the outside world simply do not apply.
Issues
One of the most important things to keep in mind about “The
Shawl” is Ozick’s fear of making art out of the Holocaust—of
using aesthetics to make something beautiful, or pleasurable,
out of something that should only be viewed with horror. In
other words, she believes that there are limitations to what can
inspire art and to what can become art. These concerns are
central to any discussion of Holocaust fiction, as artists and
critics try to balance the potential dangers of artistic expression
with the valuable insights that they can also provide. Ozick
says that she accepts Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum, “To
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” in theory;
nevertheless, she “cannot not write about it.” In Berel Lang’s
collection, Writing and the Holocaust, she explains, “It rises
up and claims my furies. All the same, I believe that the duty
of our generation, so close to the events themselves, is to
absorb the data, to learn what happened. I am not in favor of
making fiction of the data, or of mythologizing or poeticizing
it. If we each had a hundred lifetimes, there would not be
enough time to assimilate the documents. I constantly violate
this tenet; my brother’s blood cries out from the ground, and I
am drawn, and driven” (284).
“The Shawl” also makes clear that speech itself is
dangerous: despite Rosa’s desire to hear her child’s voice,
Magda is safe only as long as she is mute. The consequence of
her cry—the only dialogue in the story—is death. In
discussion, you might also consider other situations in which it
is dangerous (but necessary? inevitable?) to speak out.
Historical texts and fiction about the Holocaust tend not
to focus on the specific experiences of women, despite the fact
that men and women were generally separated in the camps.
As Carol Rittner and John Roth make clear in Different Voices,
the experiences of men and women—and their interpretations
of those experiences—were often much the same; however,
they also faced dangers that were particular to their gender. By
raising the question of Magda’s paternity, “The Shawl”
introduces the issue of rape—and subsequent pregnancy—as a
particular danger that women faced. (It also forces us to ask
whether “blood” makes any difference in determining who is a
Jew.) The fact that the protagonists in “The Shawl” are female
make this story unusual among stories about the Holocaust;
however, Ozick has always refused to see her work as
particularizing. Does gender affect your students’ reading of
“The Shawl”?
Ozick’s use of language demonstrates that all expectations
must be subverted in writing and thinking about the unnatural
world of a death camp. For example, she uses a series of
paradoxical images that combine the fantastical and the
realistic: here, a baby’s first tooth is an “elfin tombstone”; a
breast is a “dead volcano”; a starved belly is “fat, full and
round”; and a shawl can be “magic,” sheltering and nourishing
a child as an extension of the mother’s body. Ozick’s prose is
also extraordinarily compressed, giving the impression that
there is much that is left unsaid, and the narrative voice is
simultaneously appalled and oddly dispassionate. Her
minimalism manages to convey her ambivalence about using
metaphoric language to represent an experience that is nearly
unimaginable.
Original Audience
“The Shawl” was originally published in The New Yorker in
1980. Since then, it has been reprinted together with the
novella “Rosa” (in The Shawl, 1988) and anthologized many
times.
Ozick wrote this story together with a longer novella, “Rosa,”
although “Rosa” was not published until three years later in
The New Yorker. They are now published together in a single
volume, and it may be useful to consider these two stories as
part of a whole. Together, they provide different but
complimentary ways to write about the Holocaust, considering
the subject both directly and indirectly.
Students may be familiar with Art Spiegelman’s Maus,
which uses graphic art to approach the subject of the
Holocaust. How does form function in depicting the
Holocaust?
Although there are many questions incorporated into the above
discussion, you might also consider the following:
1. What does it mean for speech to be dangerous?
2. Discuss the image of the shawl (e.g., shawl as child,
shawl as source of nourishment, shawl as that which
mutes).
Bibliography
Texts listed in the headnote are the best places to begin reading
about Ozick.
General History of the Holocaust:
Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. New York:
Franklin Watts,
1982.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols.,
revised and
definitive edition. New York: Holmes and
Meier, 1985.
Holocaust Literature and Representation:
Ezrahi, Sidra. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature.
Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lang, Berel, ed. Writing and the Holocaust. New York and
London: Holmes
and Meier, 1988.
Young, James. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust:
Narrative and the
Consequences of
Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1988.
Women and the Holocaust:
Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the
Family, and Nazi
Politics. New York: St.
Martin’s, 1987.
Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices:
Women and the
Holocaust. New York: Paragon
House, 1993.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
Contributing Editor: Wendy Martin
Rich’s poetry is extremely accessible and readable. However,
there are a few allusions that cannot be understood and, from
time to time, there will be references to events or literary
works that will not be immediately recognized by students.
This material or these references are glossed in the text so the
student can understand the historical or literary context.
Other problems occur when there is fundamental
hostility to the poet over feminism. The instructor will have to
explain that feminism simply means a belief in the social,
political, and economic equality of women and men. Explain,
also, that Rich is not a man-hater or in any way unwilling to
consider men as human beings. Rather, her priority is to
establish the fundamental concerns of her women readers.
Issues
It is important to read these poems out loud, to understand that
Rich is simultaneously a political, polemical, and lyric poet. It
is important also to establish for the poems of the ’60s, the
Vietnam War protests as background as well as the feminist
movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
It is also important to emphasize that in many respects
the ’60s and ’70s were reaction to the confinement of the ’50s
and the feminine mystique of that period. In addition, stress
that the political background of the poems by Adrienne Rich
connects the personal and the political.
Rich employs free verse, dialogue, and the interweaving of
several voices. She evolves from a more tightly constructed
traditional rhymed poetry to a more open, loose, and flexible
poetic line. The instructor must stress again that poetic
subjects are chosen often for their political value and
importance. It is important once again to stress that politics
and art are intertwined, that they cannot be separated.
Aesthetic matters affect the conditions of everyday life.
Original Audience
Adrienne Rich has written her poetry for all time. While it
grows out of the political conflicts and tensions of the feminist
movement and the antiwar protests of the sixties and seventies,
it speaks of universal issues of relationships between men and
women and between women and women that will endure for
generations to come.
The feminist activist poets like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and
Carolyn Forché would be very useful to read along with Rich.
Also, it might be useful to teach poets like Allen Ginsberg and
Gary Snyder, who were, after all, poets of the beat movement
of the late ’50s and early ’60s. They were poets with a vision,
as is Rich.
1. It might be useful to discuss the evolution of the more
free and more flexible line that begins with Walt
Whitman and the greater flexibility of subject matter
that also begins with Whitman and Emily Dickinson and
to carry this discussion on through William Carlos
Williams and Allen Ginsberg to discuss the evolution of
the free verse that Rich uses.
2. Any writing topic that would discuss either the evolution
of flexible poetics or aesthetics—that is, a concern with
people’s actual lived experiences, for the way they
actually talk and think.
In addition, in the case of Rich, any paper that would
link her to other women writers of the twentieth century
(and the nineteenth, for that matter) would be useful.
Rich is often quoted as an important cultural critic who
provides the context for feminist thought in general in
the twentieth century. It might also be useful to assign
parts of her prose, either in collected essays or in Of
Woman Born.
Bibliography
I would highly recommend my own book: An American
Triptych: The Lives and Work of Anne Bradstreet, Emily
Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich. I am recommending this book
because it provides both a historical and an aesthetic context
for the poetry of Rich. It links her to earlier traditions that have
shaped her work and demonstrates effectively how American
Puritanism and American feminism are intertwined. It gives a
lot of biographical material as well as historical background
and literary analysis.
Hisaye Yamamoto (b. 1921)
Contributing Editor: King Kok Cheung
It is useful to spend some time introducing Japanese American
history and culture, especially the practice of “picture bride”
(which sheds light on the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Hayashi)
and the style of communication among Issei and Nisei.
It would be helpful to analyze “Seventeen Syllables” in
terms of a double plot: the overt one concerning Rosie and the
covert one concerning Mrs. Hayashi. Students often relate to
the interaction between mother and daughter and are appalled
by Mr. Hayashi’s callousness.
Instructors may also consider showing Hot Summer
Winds, a film written and directed by Emiko Omori, and based
on Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s
Earthquake.” It was first broadcast in May 1991 as part of
PBS’s American Playhouse series.
Issues
1. The relatively restrained interaction between Issei (first
generation) and Nisei (second generation) as a result of
both cultural prescription and language barrier;
2. The historical practice of “picture bride,” according to
which the bride and the groom had only seen each
other’s photos before marriage;
3. The theme of aborted creativity; and
4. The sexual and racial barriers faced by the author
herself, who came of age in an internment camp during
World War II
Stress the narrative strategies of the author, especially her use
of naïve narrator. While Yamamoto may have been influenced
by the modernist experimentation with limited point of view,
she also capitalizes on the scant verbal interchange between
her Japanese-American characters to build suspense and
tension.
Original Audience
The work has always been intended for a multicultural
audience, but the reader’s appreciation will undoubtedly be
enhanced by knowledge of Japanese-American history and
culture.
1. James Joyce (Dubliners) for the use of naive narrator;
2. Grace Paley for the interaction between husbands and
wives, between immigrant parents and their children;
3. Wakako Yamauchi for the relationship between mothers
and daughters
1. (a) How do cultural differences complicate
intergenerational communication in “Seventeen
Syllables”?
(b) Are there any connections between the episodes
about Rosie and those about her mother?
(c) What effects does the author achieve by using a
limited point of view?
2. (a) How does Yamamoto connect the two plots
concerning Rosie and her mother in “Seventeen
Syllables”?
(b) Analyze the theme of deception in “Seventeen
Syllables.”
(c) Compare the use of the daughter’s point of view in
Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables” and
Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice.”
Bibliography
Cheng, Ming L. “The Unrepentant Fire: Tragic Limitations in
Hisaye
Yamamoto’s ‘Seventeen Syllables.’ ” MELUS
19.4 (1994): 91–108.
Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto,
Maxine Hong
Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
———. “Double-Telling: Intertextual Silence in Hisaye
Yamamoto’s
Fiction.” American Literary History 3.2
(1991): 277–293. Reprinted
in Seventeen
Syllables, ed. Cheung, 161–180.
———. “Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi:
Interview by KingKok Cheung.” In Words
Matter: Conversations with Asian American
Writers, ed. King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press,
2000, 243–82.
———. “Reading between the Syllables: Hisaye Yamamoto’s
‘Seventeen
Syllables’ and Other Stories.” In Teaching
American Ethnic
Literatures. Ed. John R. Maitino and
David R. Peck. Albuquerque:
University of New
Mexico Press, 1996, 313–25.
Cheung, King-Kok, ed. Seventeen Syllables [A Casebook].
New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Crow, Charles L. “Home and Transcendence in Los Angeles
Fiction.” Los
Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Original
Essays. Ed. David Fine.
Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1984, 189–205.
———. “The Issei Father in the Fiction of Hisaye
Yamamoto.” In Opening
up Literary Criticism:
Essays on American Prose and Poetry, ed.
Leo
Truchlar. Salzburg: Verlag Wolfgang Neugebauer, 1986, 34–
40.
Reprinted in Seventeen Syllables, ed. Cheung, 119–
28.
Goellnicht, Don C. “Transplanted Discourse in Yamamoto’s
‘Seventeen
Syllables.’ ” In Seventeen Syllables, ed.
Cheung, 181–93.
Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to
the Writings
and Their Social Context. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press,
1982.
McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko, and Katharine Newman.
“Relocation and
Dislocation: The Writings of Hisaye
Yamamoto and Wakako
Yamauchi.” MELUS
7.3 (1980): 21–38. Reprinted in Seventeen
Syllables, ed. Cheung, 129–42.
Matsumoto, Valerie. “Desperately Seeking ‘Deirdre’: Gender
Roles,
Multicultural Relations, and Nisei Woman
Writers of the 1930s.”
Frontiers 12.1 (1991): 19–32.
Mistri, Zenobia Baxter. “ ‘Seventeen Syllables’: A Symbolic
Haiku.”
Studies in Short Fiction 27.2 (1990): 197–202.
Reprinted in
Seventeen Syllables, ed. Cheung, 195–202.
Nakamura, Cayleen. “Seventeen Syllables”: A Curriculum
Guide for High
School Classroom Use in Conjunction
with “Hot Summer Winds.”
Los Angeles:
Community Television of Southern California, 1991.
Payne, Robert M. “Adapting (to) the Margins: Hot Summer
Winds and the
Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto.” EastWest Film Journal 7.2 (1993):
39–53. Reprinted in
Rolf, Robert T. “The Short Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto,
Japanese
American Writer.” Bulletin of Fukuoka
University of Education 31.1
(1982): 71–86.
Reprinted in Seventeen Syllables, ed. Cheung, 89–108.
Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women
Poets and the
Second World War. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature:
From
Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton
University Press,
1993.
Yogi, Stan. “Rebels and Heroines: Subversive Narratives in
the Stories of
Wakako Yamauchi and Hisaye
Yamamoto.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian
America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992, 131–50.
———. “Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the
Stories of
Hisaye Yamamoto.” Studies in American
Fiction 17.2 (1989):
169–81. Reprinted in
Lawson Inada (b. 1938)
Teaching material for Lawson Inada is available on The Heath
Anthology web site. (To access the site, please go to the
Houghton Mifflin college home page at
http.//college.hmco.com. Select English, then select The
Heath Anthology textbook site.)
James Merrill (1926–1995)
Teaching material for James Merrill is available on The Heath
John Ashbery (b. 1927)
Contributing Editor: David Bergman
Students should be encouraged to explore the connections
between seemingly unrelated passages. These connections are
probably best found if the student is encouraged to move
freely through the poem at first, finding whatever connection
he or she can spot. Richard Howard convincingly argues that
each Ashbery poem contains an emblem for its entire meaning.
If allowed time, students usually find such emblems. Second,
drawing connections between Ashbery’s method and such
graphic methods as collage and assemblage often helps.
Students, of course, should be reminded to read the notes.
I have found it useful to present Ashbery in relation to
the visual arts, in particular the shifting perspective of comic
strips, the surprising juxtapositions of collage and assemblage,
the vitality of abstract impressionism, and the metaphysical
imagery of de Chirico.
Issues
The selection highlights three major themes or questions
running through Ashbery’s work: (1) the problem of subjective
identity—Whose consciousness informs the poem? (2) the
relationship between language and subjectivity—Whose
language do I speak or does the language have a mind of its
own? (3) the connection between subjectivity, language, and
place—What does it mean to be an American poet?
Ashbery has long been interested in French art, especially dada
and surrealism. Such interests have merged with an equally
strong concern for poetic form and structure, as evinced by the
sestina of “Farm Implements” and the 4 x 4 structure (four
stanzas each of four lines) of “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” a
structure he uses through Shadow Train, the volume from
which the poem was taken. Ashbery’s combination of
surrealism and formalism typifies a certain strain of
postmodernism.
Original Audience
Obviously Ashbery is writing for a highly sophisticated
contemporary audience. The decade he spent in France
provided him with an international perspective.
Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler are or were
close friends of Ashbery; together they formed the nucleus of
what is sometimes dubbed the New York School of Poetry.
The dreamlike imagery bears some resemblance to John
Berryman and Allen Ginsberg. Walt Whitman provides a
particularly vital touchstone to an American tradition.
How do comic strips (and other forms of popular art) inform
both the content and style of Ashbery’s poems? Who is
speaking in an Ashbery poem? What is American about John
Ashbery?
Bibliography
Altieri, Charles. “John Ashbery.” In Self and Sensibility in
Contemporary
American Poetry. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Berger, Charles. “Vision in the Form of a Task.” Lehman,
163–208.
Bergman, David. “Introduction: John Ashbery.” In Reported
Sightings: Art
Chronicles 1957–87. New York:
Knopf, 1989, xi–xxiii.
———. “Choosing Our Fathers: Gender and Identity in
Whitman, Ashbery
and Richard Howard.”
American Literary History 1 (1989): 383–403.
Lehman, David, ed. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John
Ashbery.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Pedro Pietri (b. 1944)
Contributing Editor: Frances R. Aparicio
As with other Nuyorican poets, the language switching and
references to either Spanish or Puerto Rican culture need to be
explained. Preparing a handout with a glossary and giving a
small introduction to life in El Barrio (perhaps with photos,
pictures, or videos) might also be helpful.
Pedro Pietri has produced two records, “Loose Joints”
and “One is a Crowd” (Folkway Records). If available, they
would be good for classroom use.
Some students might have a difficult time understanding
the anger and the bitterness of Pietri’s voice against “the
system,” an issue for disagreement and discussion.
Issues
Pietri’s poetry is political poetry in its most direct sense: a
poetry of denunciation, directed to create a cultural
consciousness among the members of the Puerto Rican
community. Other themes are the demythification of authority
figures and social institutions (government, schools, church,
“the system”); alienation in contemporary urban life; a
surrealistic search for the truth in the irrational and the absurd.
In addition, the political status and the poverty levels for
Puerto Ricans in New York can be discussed in light of
Pietri’s denunciation of “the system.” How do students feel
about the welfare system and about the Hispanic poor in this
country? About the First World/Third World dichotomies
within the United States?
“Puerto Rican Obituary” can be read as a parody of an epic
poem (the dream and the search and the epic deeds of a nation
inverted), and within an antiaesthetic attitude. Again, as in
Laviera, this is oral poetry to be recited and screamed. In
Traffic Violations, Pietri’s poetry falls within the surrealistic
mode, fragmented images, search for the absurd in everyday
life, irrational, surprising metaphors, and imagery, humor, and
sarcasm.
Original Audience
Though quite contemporary, Pietri’s poetry has to be
understood in terms of its original objective of addressing the
masses as oral poetry. This is important in order to achieve a
true understanding of his use of popular language, anger, and
antiaesthetic style.
I believe that fruitful comparisons may be drawn if one looks
into Allen Ginsberg and other poets of the beat generation and
of the ’60s (as poetry of social denouncement, protest, and
harsh antiacademic language). Also compare with
contemporary African-American poets who deal with urban
themes, alienation, and social injustice.
1. For “Puerto Rican Obituary,” questions dealing with
theme: What is it denouncing? How are the
“puertorriqueños” portrayed? Analyze image of death.
Would you define it as an “epic” poem? What is the use
of Spanish in the poem? Consider the poem as an
example of urban literature; define the utopian space
that Pietri proposes.
2. Paper topics might deal with Puerto Rican migration;
use of Spanish and English (for aesthetic effect);
functions of humor and irony; analyze the poems as
“outlaw” literature.
Bibliography
Two general articles on Puerto Rican writers discuss Pietri’s
work:
Acosta-Belén, Edna. “The Literature of the Puerto Rican
National Minority
in the United States.” The
Bilingual Review 5:1–2 (Jan.–Aug. 1978):
107–
16.
Cruz, Arnaldo. “Teaching Puerto Rican Authors:
Modernization and Identity
in Nuyorican
Literature.” ADE Journal published by the Modern
Language Association (December 1988).
Rudolfo A. Anaya (b. 1937)
Contributing Editor: Raymund Paredes
Bless Me, Ultima is a bildungsroman and can be compared
usefully to other works of this type, notably James Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Another important
quality of Bless Me, Ultima is its heavy reliance on Mexican
folklore, particularly such well-known legends as “La
Llorona.” There are many collections of Mexican and
Mexican-American folklore that would give students a sense
of the traditions that influence Anaya’s novel. I recommend,
for example, Americo Paredes’s Folktales of Mexico (which
has a very useful introduction) and Mexican-American
Folklore by James O. West. Another important issue to
consider is how Anaya tries to impart a flavor of MexicanAmerican culture to his work. In the excerpt from Bless Me,
Ultima, Anaya uses Mexican names, Spanish words and
phrases, and focuses on one of the strongest institutions of
Mexican-American life, the Catholic church. If it is true that
much of American culture and literature grow out of
Protestantism, it would be worth examining how those parts of
American culture that are based in Catholicism are distinctive.
Issues
The protagonist of Bless Me, Ultima is Antonio, who is
coming of age at the conclusion of World War II. Participation
in the war has clearly had a dramatic impact on Antonio’s
older brothers, who now regard the rather isolated life of
central New Mexico as dull and confining. Clearly, Antonio’s
community is in a state of transition and its citizens must face
the inevitability of greater interaction with the world beyond
their valley. Not far from Antonio’s community, at White
Sands, the atomic bomb is being tested. Anaya uses the bomb
not only to represent the unprecedented capacity of the human
race to annihilate itself but to symbolize the irresistible
encroachment of modern technology not only in rural New
Mexico but everywhere.
Perhaps the major question that Anaya confronts is how
Mexican Americans can retain certain key traditional values
while accepting the inevitability—and desirability—of change.
In dealing with this issue, Anaya places the boy Antonio under
the tutelage of the wise curandera (folkhealer), Ultima, who
prepares her charge for the future by grounding him in the rich
Spanish and Indian cultures of his past. For Ultima, tradition is
not confining but liberating.
One of the striking characteristics of Bless Me, Ultima is
its critical stance toward Catholicism, which is presented here
as rigid, intimidating, and, at least to Antonio and his friends,
largely unintelligible. The Catholic God is punishing while
Antonio and his friends long for a nurturing deity. In attacking
certain aspects of Catholicism, Anaya follows a long line of
Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano writers including José
Antonio Villarreal and Tomás Rivera.
Bless Me, Ultima is a fairly conventional novel structurally,
although Anaya does use such devices as stream of
consciousness, flashbacks, and shifting narrators. As noted
above, the key formal and stylistic question is how Anaya
attempts to present his novel as a distinctly Chicano work of
fiction. Again, Anaya employs Spanish words and names (a
boy called Florence, for example, from the Spanish
“Florencio”) and focuses on important cultural events in
Chicano experience. But for the most part, in terms of formal
qualities and structure, Bless Me, Ultima is very much a
contemporary American novel.
Original Audience
Bless Me, Ultima is a work that intends to explain and depict
Mexican-American culture in New Mexico for a general
American audience. Never-theless, Anaya’s presentation of
Mexican-American culture is relatively “thick” so as to appeal
to Chicano readers as well.
Bless Me, Ultima has clearly been influenced by Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Another interesting
juxtaposition is with Native Son, Richard Wright’s account of
a young man—older than Antonio—who comes of age without
much of a sense of his past and with few prospects in the
harsh, urban environment of Chicago. Anaya’s presentation of
the Catholic Church can be fruitfully compared to that of José
Antonio Villarreal in Pocho; Anaya’s focus on MexicanAmerican childhood is complemented nicely by Tomás
Rivera’s . . . y no sé lo tragó la tierra and Sandra Cisneros’s
The House on Mango Street.
1. The excerpt from Bless Me, Ultima focuses on events
surrounding Lent. Students can be asked to write about
their experiences of this occasion or other important
religious events. Comparing different sorts of religious
experiences could be very useful.
2. As Anaya presents Catholicism, the Church emphasizes
punishment and damnation rather than forgiveness and
salvation. What is the effect on Antonio and his friends?
How do they respond to church practices and rituals? Do
students have any ideas about how religion might be
presented to children more positively and successfully?
3. Have the students consider the bildungsroman as a
literary form. Why is it so enduring? How would the
students write one of their own lives? What would be
the central experiences they would focus on?
Richard Rodriguez (b. 1944)
Teaching material for Richard Rodriguez is available on The
Heath Anthology web site. (To access the site, please go to the
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934)
Contributing Editor: Marcellette Williams
The typical problems in teaching Baraka’s poetry have to do
with what has been called his “unevenness”—perhaps more
accurately attributable to the tension inherent in balancing
Baraka’s role as poet and his role as activist—and the strident
tone of some of his poems—also related to his political
activism.
Both problems are probably best addressed directly by
inviting the students to describe or characterize their
impressions of the impetus for the poems as they read them
(stressing “their reading” is critical and complements what
current reading theory regards as the essential role of the
reader in any reading paradigm), then asking them to
substantiate textually those impressions. Such a strategy
finesses the temptation to engage in a definitive debate of the
politics of the time as the genesis and raison d’être of Baraka’s
poetry. Further, such a strategy allows students to explore the
aesthetics as well as the politics of his poetry and understand
better the inter/inner-(con)textuality of the two.
Because the “sound” of Baraka’s poetry is essential to
texturing or fleshing out its meaning, readings aloud should
contribute to discussions as well as to the introduction to his
work.
Students respond almost always to the intimacy of
Baraka’s poems; sometimes they are offended by that
intimacy, and this posture often leads to discussions of poetic
necessity. Students also raise the question of the paradox of
Baraka’s clear aesthetic debts and his vehemence in trying to
tear down that very Western ideal.
Issues
It is important to emphasize the themes of death and despair in
the early poems, moral and social corruption with its
concomitant decrying of Western values and ethics, the
struggle against self-hatred, a growing ethnic awareness, and
the beneficent view of and creative energy occasioned by
“black magic.”
The issues to focus on historically involve the racial
tenor of the decades represented by his poetic output as well as
the poetic aesthetics of imagism, projectivism, and Dadaism—
all of which influenced Baraka to some extent.
From the perspective of personal issues, his bohemian
acquaintances of the fifties (Charles Olson and Allen
Ginsberg, for example), his marriage to Hettie Cohen, his visit
to Cuba, his name change, the death of Malcolm X, and his
Obie for The Dutchman are all important considerations.
It is appropriate to refer to the question of “school,” here again
in the context of the poet’s use of sound and images as the
articulation of form and meaning. I would further encourage
the students to pay careful attention to Baraka’s use of
repetition—at the lexical, syntactic, semantic, and
phonological levels. What is its effect? Does it inform? If so,
how? Are there aspects of the poems one might regard as
transformations? If so, what might they be? What effect might
they have? How might they function in the poem?
Baraka’s consideration of the significance of “roots”
appears to evolve in his poetry. How might you characterize
it?
Original Audience
A consideration of progenitors and progeny provides a
convenient point of departure for a discussion of audience for
Baraka’s work. Students interested in imagism and
projectivism, for example, will certainly value Baraka’s efforts
as an effective use of those aesthetic doctrines toward the
shaping of poetry of revolution appropriate for the time.
Baraka’s influence is apparent in the poetry of Sonia
Sanchez and Ntozake Shange. What aspects of this influence,
if any, might contribute to considerations of audience with
regard to time and poetry?
In considering Baraka’s conscious use of language for poetic
effect, com-parisons with William Carlos Williams (for the use
of the vernacular and the idiom) and with Ezra Pound (for its
communicative focus) are appropriate. Sometimes in
discussions of Baraka’s early poems, the criticism compares
them in tone and theme—moral decay and social
disillusionment—with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
1. Frank Smith discusses the “behind the eyeball”
information a reader brings to text. Louise Rosenblatt
discusses the expectations and experiences a reader
brings to “transact” or negotiate meaning with text.
Given those considerations of the reader, prediscussion
questions might be designed to elicit from the reader
whatever information or preconceptions he or she has
about the author and/or his work. If the students are
totally unfamiliar with Baraka, then questions eliciting
experiential responses to the broad issues of theme or
technique would be appropriate—“What, if anything, do
the terms social fragmentation and/or moral decay mean
to you?” “What would you imagine as a poetic attack on
society? Or a poetic ethnic response to a dead or dying
society?”
2. Writing assignments and topics for the students are
derived from the assumption that as readers their
participation is essential to meaning. Topics are not
generally prescribed but, rather, derived from the
questions about and interest in the author and his
(Baraka’s) work. These assignments sometimes take the
form of poetic responses, critical essays, or “dialogues”
with Baraka.
Bibliography
Brown, Lloyd W. “Baraka as Poet.” In Lloyd W. Brown’s
Amiri Baraka.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980,
Chapter 5, 104–35.
Harris, William J. “The Transformed Poem.” In The Poetry
and Poetics of
Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic.
Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1985,
91–121.
Lacey, Henry. “Die Schwartze Bohemien: ‘The Terrible
Disorder of a
Young Man’ ” and “Imamu.” In To
Raise, Destroy, and Create. Troy,
New York:
The Whitstone Publishing Company, 1981, 1–42, 93–162.
Sollors, Werner. “Who Substitutes for the Dead Lecturer?:
Poetry of the
Early 1960s.” In Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones:
The Quest for a Populist Modernism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1978,
83–95.
Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934)
Contributing Editors: Joyce Joyce and John Reilly
There is a widespread feeling that protest and politics are
either inappropriate to literature or, if acceptable at certain
times, the time for it has now passed.
The whole course should be founded upon an
acceptance of the fact that there are no a priori definitions for
literature. Poetry is what the poet writes or the audience claims
as poetry. The real issues are whether or not the poet sets out a
plausible poetics (one neither too solipsistic nor so
undiscriminating as to dissolve meaning) and whether or not
the practice of the poet has the local excitement and
disciplined language to make it aesthetically satisfying. Upon
these premises, the study of Sonia Sanchez can proceed with
attention to her idea of revolutionary poetry associated with
nation building, as it was discussed int the 1960s and 1970s.
Operating on the assumption that there is some common
tradition underlying work of poets who declare ethnicity
(African American) as their common identity, useful
discussion is possible about ways Sanchez differs from
Michael Harper and Jay Wright. What differences in aesthetic
and practice account for the relative complexity of Harper and
Wright when contrasted with Sanchez? But, then, what allows
us to consider them all black poets? Surely not merely the
selection of subject matter?
Issues
The historical and political are boldly set out in Sanchez’s
poetry. The personal may be overlooked by the hasty reader,
but the poetry develops a persona with a highly subjective
voice conveying the impression of a real human being feeling
her way to positions, struggling to make her expressive
declarative writing conform to her intuitions and interior self.
This tension once observed makes all the themes arranged
around the black aesthetic and black politics also accessible.
The “eye” devices (lowercase letters, speed writing, fluid
lines) along with the free form of verse and vernacular word
choice are avant-garde devices seen in the work of many other
poets. The point here is to see them associated with an
aesthetic that privileges the oral and musical. For Sanchez it
would be valuable to point to the frequency with which
African-American poets allude to jazz performers, even
making their lines sound like a musical instrument, just as,
historically, musical instruments imitated the sounds of voice
in early jazz and blues. This would make the vigor of the poem
on the Righteous Brothers understandable, for music is a
talisman of African-American culture. It would also set up a
useful contrast between poetry written for print and poetry
written to simulate the ephemerality of performed music or
song.
Original Audience
For Sanchez these questions have great importance, for she has
undergone important changes that have brought the spiritual
and personal more forward in her verse. Dating her poems in
connection with political events is very important. One might,
for example, talk about an avowedly nationalist poetry written
for a struggle to assert values believed to be a source of
community solidarity. There are many parallels to suggest,
including the writing of Irish authors in English, JewishAmerican writers adapting the sounds of Yiddish to an
exploration of traditional values in English, etc. Following the
nationalist period of her work we see a shift of focus. One
must ask students if the elements centered in the newer poems
were not already present before. The appropriate answer (yes)
will permit assertion of the developing nature of a writer’s
corpus, something worth presenting in all courses.
“Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love” could be contrasted with
confessional verse such as Plath’s “Daddy” to distinguish the
ways feeling can be dis-tanced. Similarly the feminist voices
of Adrienne Rich and Marge Piercy can introduce subtle
distinctions when contrasted with the same Sanchez
narrative/poem. What, we might ask, is the basis of distinction:
formal or attitudinal?
1. Recalling the use of the mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar,
consider what differences have occurred to change the
meaning of that image in the 88 years until Sanchez
published “Masks.”
2. A society may be culturally diverse; yet, that does not
mean that cultures are similarly powerful or influential.
Discuss the way that Sonia Sanchez and other
revolutionary black poets see the relationship between
their culture and that of the dominant white society.
Bibliography
Joyce, Joyce A. “The Development of Sonia Sanchez: A
Continuing
Journey.” Indian Journal of American
Studies 13 (July 1983): 37–71.
———. Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic
Tradition. Chicago:
Third World Press, 1996.
Harris, Trudier, and Thadious Davis, eds. Dictionary of
Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955
(1985), 295–306.
Tate, Claudia. Black Woman Writers at Work. New York:
Continuum Press,
1983, 132–148.
June Jordan (b. 1936)
Contributing Editor: Agnes Moreland Jackson
Students of the 1960s and early 1970s (as well as today’s
college-age youth) thought about and acted on nonfamilial
kinships, that is, relationships between individuals having
agency; groups, personhood in the community, space or turf—
local/national/global; responsibility—private and corporate;
power/powerlessness; most of the “-isms” and phobias of
historical and contemporary societies worldwide. These are
some of the recurring subjects in Jordan’s three poems
included in The Heath Anthology and throughout her volumes
of poetry and essays. She belongs to the world (though it
despises and rejects her), and her voice of discovery, pain,
rage, and resolution penetrates our minds and emotions.
College students, therefore, recognize her concerns while also
wondering sometimes whether Jordan’s societal and world
portrait is “as bad” as her texts declare. Even those as
wounded as she describes herself have to think deeply to make
the connections, see the intricate patterns, and analyze
situations to determine Jordan’s accuracy or error about social
and human conditions. Because the issues in her poetry reflect
our everyday experiences, we can comprehend Jordan’s poetry
and note correspondences between and among the following:
Jordan’s observations and protestations; daily news about
victims of violence whose lives are affected by political and
economic decisions. An invitation to discuss the poems here
could prompt students’ own sharing of their personal
experiences (of physical or emotional assault, acceptance or
rejection of opportunity, and reaction to media images, health,
and health services).
Moreover, hearing Jordan is crucial to appreciating and
understanding the power of her poetry. Beyond urging my
students to read all poetry aloud (and we read aloud in class), I
stress the rich orality of poetic expression by many African
Americans (from Dunbar to Hughes and Brown, from Hayden
and Walker and Brooks to Evans and Sanchez and Cortez, as
well as Lorde, Knight, Reed, Clifton, and Harper), among
whom Jordan is outstanding for the “being-spoken-now”
qualities of her poems. Two of the “talking passages”
(describing aptly the entire 114 lines) in “Poem about My
Rights” are its opening and lines 45 to 49. Reading this poem
aloud in a class need not be difficult in any college for at least
two reasons: its personal, intimate, talking-directly-to-you
quality and the generally acknowledged present-day awareness
of the twenty-five percent probability that rape might become
real to any woman in the U.S. Single voices (including those
of male students) reading the poem in sequence diminish
possible embarrassment over the sustained and repeated use of
the words “rape,” “penetrate,” and “ejaculate” as reality and as
metaphor. The poem’s insistence upon the equal status of all
oppressions stimulates serious discussion that includes not
only homo- and bisexuality; instead, interest remains for
persistent philosophical quests to engage and understand
freedom and responsibility, law and justice, power and respect,
and so on. Students usually agree with the linking of all
oppressions, not withstanding the risk of having to reveal their
own characteristics and/or prejudices. Anglo males, especially,
need time and much reassurance that female peers understand
the socially constructed bases of male behavior deemed to be
oppressive, for Jordan denounces hurtful action, not its
causes—including females complicit in maintaining
patriarchal privilege to oppress.
“To Free Nelson Mandela” has the oral qualities of a
ritual chant. Its repetitions enhance (1) recognition of the many
years of Mandela’s imprisonment and—hence—(2) the near
miracle of his survival which invokes urgent and continually
growing cosmic demands that he be freed, and (3) the power
and rightness of a wife’s loyalty and work—instead of
withdrawal into seclusion (hence, no Penelope is she but a
warrior who has taken up the battle). However protracted,
however gross, atrocities do not dehumanize their victims, nor
can horror outlast living “waters of the world” as they “turn to
the softly burning/light of the moon.” Ironically, almost
mystically, atrocities eventually cause oppressed people,
however despised, to come together in reaffirmation and in
ritual, including the ceremonies of life to be lived fully before
dying. (Cf. African slaves in the Western world, their
understanding of self-worth, i.e., somebodiness conferred by a
believed-in God—despite the ineffable horrors of bondage.)
Issues
These three poems reveal the speakers’ firm understanding
that their respective experiences (or those witnessed and
reported on in “To Free Nelson Mandela”) validate the
deduction by the speaker in “Poem about My Rights” that she
and all other oppressed persons, nations, and peoples are
victims because they are viewed by their torturers to be wrong.
Therefore, wrong are the victims enumerated in lines 7
through 12 in “To Free Nelson Mandela”: the “twelve-year-old
girl,” “the poet,” “the students,” “the chil-dren.” “[M]urdered
Victoria Mxenge” (1.17) was wrong to have been a lawyer
who “defended [B]lacks charged with political crimes” (The
Holly-wood Reporter, July 19, 1991), writes the reviewer of
the hit musical “Sarafina,” based on the horrors of and spiritual
triumphs over South African apartheid. Martyred in 1985 in
the midst of her daring and skillful work, “Durban human
rights lawyer” (Agence France Presse, June 22, 1993) Mxenge
was killed (by the official police, think most in the world) “the
day before she was scheduled to defend 17 . . . [Black
activists] on charges of treason” (Los Angeles Times, August
29, 1991). Her ANC-supporter spouse, Griffiths Mxenge, also
a lawyer, had been murdered in 1981.
These data, only the tip of the iceberg, demonstrate
again Jordan’s total immersion in the lives of oppressed people
of color wherever they suffer in the world. Revelations in the
1990s—most carried in newspapers around the globe—about
allegedly police-perpetrated murders in South Africa during
the mid-1980s were not news to Jordan, who in 1989 had
published the Mandela poem among other “new” poems
composed between 1985 and 1989. From line 36 through line
57 of “To Free Nelson Mandela,” Jordan commemorates the
beginning-to-heal black township community of Lingelihle
(outside Cradock), where in 1985 (as reported in The
Guardian of August 11, 1992, “[f]rom all over South Africa,
tens of thousands of mourners converged on . . . [the
township] . . . for the funeral of . . . [four Black activists]”
including Matthew Goniwe, an “immensely popular leader” in
a “ ‘backveld revolution’ [that had swept] South Africa” in
1983. Less poetic than Jordan’s rendering of Goniwe’s
transformational impact on his comrades in suffering is the
following very helpful newspaper explanation of why his
death was felt so deeply by so many:
Son of a domestic servant and a seller of
firewood, he had inspired the community to
form a residents’ association which demanded
urgent reforms in the dusty, poverty-stricken
township. Studious, quiet, small and
bespectacled, Goniwe had raised educational
standards, given self-respect to unemployed
young [B]lacks and stopped much of the
drinking and pot smoking. Repeatedly
detained and accused of agitating, he
remarked, “[Agitation] is not required when
you have apartheid—the greatest agitator of
all.”
(The Guardian, 8/11/92)
The journalistic furor in 1992 about events in 1985 was
sparked by the publication in June 1992 of an official, topsecret message “dated June 7, 1985” that revealed senior
officers in South Africa’s security forces to have plotted the
murders of Goniwe and three others. On March 9, 1991, The
Chicago Tribune had carried a report of Amnesty
International’s having cited the death of Victoria Mxenge
among other crimes against human rights.
In her 1976 essay “Declaration of an Independence I
Would Just as Soon Not Have” (in the 1981 collection of
essays, Civil Wars, published by Beacon Press), in which she
remarks on the practical necessity of folk’s uniting and
working together to effect changes toward justice, Jordan
writes of the “hunger and . . . famine afflicting some 800
million lives on earth” as “a fact that leaves . . . [one]
nauseous, jumpy, and chronically enraged.” She says also that
“with all . . . [her] heart and mind . . . [she] would strive in any
way . . . to eradicate the origins of . . . [the] colossal
exploitation and abuse” experienced by “[t]he multimillionfold majority of the peoples on earth [who] are neither white,
nor powerful, nor exempt from terrifying syndromes of
disease, hunger, poverty that defies description, and prospects
for worse privation or demeaning subsistence” (115–16; 117).
Jordan’s rage at injustices and violations of personhood, as
well as her compassion and empathy, are large and constant, as
can be recognized by even a quick reading of her poetry and
essays.
Although not among her most recent poems, “Moving
Towards Home” is as significant as any to be related to
Jordan’s personal life, a life informed by her love of black
people, a love that anchors her love for, and work and yearning
for, freedom and justice for all oppressed people. She can
relate to, can feel as, can be a Palestinian because the space,
the room for living has become smaller and smaller
geographically and in all other ways that destruction, death,
bigotry, and hatred have crowded out life. “[T]o make our way
home” would be to reclaim life, to reclaim “room” for “living”
for ourselves and oppressed others.
Like many contemporary black and other poets of the U.S.,
Jordan uses language boldly and fully, not shying away from
stereotypically or conventionally “ugly” words or ideas. Thus,
she writes about what is real and what should not be: all
manner of injustice, repression, oppression; diverse kinds of
self- and personhood. “Poem about My Rights” captures most
completely the unbounded range of Jordan’s subjects, as well
as the rich juxtaposing and combining of free verse, linearly
arranged sentences, parallelism, unpunctuated parenthetical
remarks, repetition, freely (but not randomly) used virgules or
slashes to hold or pull ideas together. Opening the poem in
medias res gives form to Jordan’s repeated thesis that selfdetermination is precluded by all oppressions and any
oppression— occurring in any order at any age anywhere on
the earth, and perpetrated by nominal friends (e.g., parents,
members of one’s own racial, sexual, occupational, and gender
group) or recognized enemies. Jordan makes situational
analogies and projections that meld all aspects of her being
into one seamless personal: family; politics—local, national,
worldwide, as well as racial and sexual; geography—general
space, particular places, personified places, urban and rural
spaces; history; esthetics; economics; her body and the bodies
of others; sexism, racism, classism, ageism.
As is true for her contemporaries Adrienne Rich and Audre
Lorde, sexuality is a crucial attribute of June Jordan’s identity
and her premise for self-expression and interaction with others.
These distinguished, radically iconoclastic writers demand full
recognition of the “difference/s.” Lorde emphasizes her
blackness, femaleness, lesbianism—in “butch” and “fem”
roles (as I read her essays, particularly), her relatedness to all
other women needing/seeking autonomy of personhood, and
the ultimately fatal possession of her life by cancer.
Progressively through her poetry and essays, Lorde becomes a
winner, psychologically triumphant over all of these popularly
acknowledged detractors from fullness of living. Rich defines
herself as female, lesbian, white, southern, and a Jew.
Together with emphatically engaging myriad and worldwide
economic, cultural, educational, and political oppressions (as
Jordan does), both Rich and Lorde, respectively as applicable,
recognize and experience (as Jordan does) abuses of power—
shaped usually as sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism,
anti-Semitism, classism, and ageism—and “triggered,”
presumably, by the women’s “differences”—however ageless
and normal, immutable, and real. For Jordan add bisexuality,
that is, difference with a difference, and she stands out from
the others in the triad. Possessing sexualities, Jordan
experiences discrimination among the less complex or more
“normal” lesbians. This experience is what seems to have
clarified her view that any oppression equals all other
oppressions without hierarchical or invidious distinctions.
Jordan also refuses to privilege oppressors who are more
“like” her than some other oppressors might be. Thus, African
Americans and lesbians who would presume to judge her
bisexuality or any attribute or freely chosen nonthreatening
behavior toward others must be called what they are: tyrants
(“A New Politics of Sexuality,” Technical Difficulties 90; the
entire essay is must reading for any who would try to
comprehend Jordan fully).
The following are suggestions for class enjoyment of
reading/thinking aloud about Jordan’s “Moving Towards
Home”: (1) Do students detect any slowing down, possibly an
emphasis at lines 35, 37, and in lines where the persona quotes
other people’s voices? (2) Does it matter that readers might
not/probably do not know the actual speakers: That the quoted
passages might be/might not be historical? (3) Ask students to
consider structure, meaning, and context by noting differences
between the quoted passages and lines 47, 48, 49; (4) The
importance of reading aloud and carefully can be stressed by
discussing the difference between “those who dare” in lines
35, 39, 41 and “those who dare” in line 46; (5) Visual interest
enhances that of sound as readers notice that “speak about” in
the poem’s first thirty-one lines all line up/stack up, one above
the next succeeding instance, that “about unspeakable events”
breaks this pattern spatially as well as linguistically in the
reversed order of the main words, and in the negativizing of
“speak” by use of the prefix un. All events that the persona
does “not wish to speak about” are spoken with chilling effect;
about from line 53 to the end precedes home & living room;
home envelopes living room.
Bibliography
Arnold Adoff’s 1973 anthology The Poetry of Black America
includes four outstanding Jordan poems, while Erlene Stetson
in Black Sister (1981) contains only one by Jordan (a must,
however, about Native Americans) but six by Lorde, seven by
Jayne Cortez, and three by Sanchez.
Etheridge Knight (1931–1991)
Contributing Editor: Patricia Liggins-Hill
Students often lack the knowledge of the new black aesthetic,
the black oral tradition, and contemporary black poetry, in
general. I lecture on major twentieth-century black poets and
literary movements. In addition, I provide supplementary
research articles, primarily from BALF (Black American
Literature Forum) and CLA (College Language Association).
Since Knight has read his poems on various college
campuses throughout the country, I use tapes of his poetry
readings. I also read his poetry aloud and invite students to do
likewise, since his punctuation guides the reader easily through
the oral poems.
Students, black and white, identify with the intense pain,
loneliness, frustration, and deep sense of isolation Knight
expresses in his prison poetry. They often compare their own
sense of isolation, frustration, and depression as college
students with his institutional experience.
Students often ask the following questions:
1. Why haven’t they been previously exposed to this
significant poet and to the new black aesthetic?
2. How did Knight learn to write poetry so well in prison
with only an eighth-grade education?
3. What is the difference between written and transcribed
oral poetry?
Issues
Knight’s major themes are (1) liberation and (2) the black
heritage. Since slavery has been a crucial reality in black
history, much of Knight’s poetry focuses on a modern kind of
enslavement, imprisonment; his work searches for and
discovers ways in which a person can be free while
incarcerated. His poems are both personal and communal. As
he searches for his own identity and meaning in life, he
explores the past black American life experience from both its
southern and its African heritage.
Knight’s poetry should be taught within the historical
context of the civil rights and black revolutionary movements
of the 1960s and 1970s. The social backdrop of his and other
new black poets’ cries against racism were the assassinations
of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., John and Robert
Kennedy, also the burning of ghettos, the bombings of black
schools in the South, the violent confrontations between white
police and black people, and the strong sense of awareness of
poverty in black communities.
What the teacher should emphasize is that—while
Knight shares with Baraka, Madhubuti, Major, and the other
new black poets the bond of black cultural identity (the bond
of the oppressed, the bond formed by black art, etc.)—he,
unlike them, emerged after serving an eight-year prison term
for robbery from a second consciousness of community. This
community of criminals is what Franz Fanon calls “the
lumpenproletariat,” “the wretched of the earth.” Ironically,
Knight’s major contribution to the new aesthetic is derived
from this second sense of consciousness which favorably
reinforces his strong collective mentality and identification as
a black artist. He brings his prison consciousness, in which the
individual is institutionally destroyed and the self becomes
merely one number among many, to the verbal structure of his
transcribed oral verse.
Consider the following questions:
1. What is the new black aesthetic and what are Knight’s
major con-tributions to the arts movement?
2. What are the black oral devices in Knight’s poetry and
what are his major contributions to the black oral
tradition?
3. What are the universal elements in Knight’s poetry?
4. In the “Idea of Ancestry” and “The Violent Space,” how
does Knight fuse various elements of “time and space”
not only to denote his own imprisonment but also to
connote the present social conditions of black people in
general?
5. How does Knight develop his black communal art forms
in his later poems “Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy”
and “Ilu, the Talking Drum”?
6. What are the major influences on Knight’s poetry?
(Discuss the influences of Walt Whitman, Langston
Hughes, and Sterling Brown.)
7. How does Knight’s earlier poetry differ from his later
poems? (Discuss in terms of the poet’s voice, tone, and
techniques, e.g., oral devices, imagery.)
Original Audience
Knight addresses black people in particular, and a mixed
audience in general. He uses a variety of communal art forms
and techniques such as blues idioms, jazz and African pulse
structures, as well as clusters of communal images that link the
poet and his experience directly to his reader/audience. For the
latter, the teacher should use examples of images from “The
Idea of Ancestry” and “The Bones of My Father” (if this poem
is available).
Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Walt Whitman are the
major influences on Knight’s poetry. Knight’s “The Idea of
Ancestry” flows in a Whitmanesque style and his “Blues for a
Mississippi Black Boy” stems from the transcribed oral, blues
poetic tradition of Hughes and Brown. He has indicated these
influences in “An Interview with Etheridge Knight” by
Patricia L. Hill (San Francisco Review of Books 3, no. 9
[1978]: 10).
1. (a) How does Knight’s poetry differ in content, form,
and style from that of the earlier oral poets Hughes
and Brown? How is his poetry similar to theirs?
(b) How does Knight’s poetry differ in content, form,
and style from that of Baraka, Madhubuti, and the
other major new black aesthetic poets? How is his
poetry similar to theirs?
2. (a) The Western “Art for Art’s Sake” Aesthetic
Principle versus the New Black Aesthetic.
(b) The Importance of Knight’s Prison
“Lumpenproletariat” Con-sciousness to the New
Black Aesthetic.
(c) The Major Poetic Influences on Knight’s Poetry.
(d) The Written and Oral Poetry Elements in Knight’s
Poetry.
(e) Whitman’s versus Knight’s Vision of America
(f ) Knight’s Open and Closed Forms of Poetry.
Bibliography
Nketia, J. H. Kwalena. The Music of Africa. New York: W. W.
Norton,
1974.
Alice Walker (b. 1944)
Contributing Editor: Marilyn Richardson
Issues
1. The bemused black women for whom a creative, witty,
and compassionate union with the universe is as natural
as breathing.
2. The volcanic forces that go into the creative life and
work of a heroine like the narrator. See her account of
her encounter with Bessie Smith.
3. The theft of black music by white musicians who do not
understand what they are performing.
The narrative voice in this story is deceptively informal and
uneducated. Gracie Mae Still is in fact extremely subtle and
sophisticated. The reader must put aside assumptions about her
speech and learn from her on her own terms.
Bibliography
“Alice Walker Reads ‘nineteen fifty-five’ ” and an “Interview
with Alice Walker,” in which she discusses the story, are tapes
available from The American Audio Prose Library, P.O. Box
842, Columbia, MO 65205.
James Alan McPherson (b. 1943)
Contributing Editor: John F. Callahan
Students are unfamiliar with the railroads and the extent to
which black men were a fraternity in the service jobs on the
trains. There is some need to explain the argot of railroading,
to familiarize students with the vocabulary and syncopated
accents of the black vernacular.
Involve students with the rich variations of the oral
tradition. Get them telling stories, in particular stories of how
they met and came to know people of very different
backgrounds because of summer jobs. It helps to read chunks
of the story out loud.
Students are often interested in Youngblood’s attitude
toward the storyteller and the storyteller’s attitude toward Doc
Craft.
Issues
The complexity and richness as well as the hardships of the
lives lived by black traveling men; the initiative and kinship
developed by the black workers; the qualities of the trickster;
also the ways racism surcharges the attempts by blacks and
whites to master situations and each other. Once again, the fact
that the story is told by an old-timer about to quit (in 1964 or
so) to Youngblood—the college student in a temporary job—
about working on the road for the last twenty years or more
sets up important contrasts between the past and the present,
particularly the impact of technology on older ways of work
and life.
The relationship of oral storytelling as an initiation ritual to
McPherson’s craft of fiction writing, particularly his resolve to
initiate readers of all races into a facet of their culture passing
quickly out of sight.
See Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”; Ellison’s “King of the Bingo
Game”; Walker’s “Nineteen Fifty-Five”; and Silko’s
“Lullaby.”
What is the significance of the name Doc Craft?
Bibliography
Ellison, Ralph and James McPherson. “Indivisible Man.”
Atlantic
(December 1970): 45–60
McPherson, James. “On Becoming an American Writer.”
Atlantic 242, no.
6 (December 1978): 53–57.
Ernest J. Gaines (b. 1933)
Contributing Editor: John F. Callahan
The simplicity and tautness of Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray”
sometimes lulls students to sleep and leads them, at first, not to
look for some of the abiding, archetypal patterns in this story.
Partly, this is due to the young boy’s voice. Given the changes
in race relations between the time in which the story was set,
then written, and now, students need to read very carefully to
pick up the nuances of this 1940s social milieu.
Instructor and students should read large chunks of the
story out loud. Secondly, background on this milieu is very
helpful; for this reason I urge that Gaines’s essay “Miss Jane
and I” (Callaloo 1, no. 3 [May 1974]) be offered as a
companion to the story.
Students often ask about the actuality of segregation—
they wonder whether Gaines’s details are accurate. In addition,
they ask whether the story’s voice is consistently that of the
young boy James.
Issues
The story is about a young boy having to grow up earlier than
he might have wished or than the adults in his family might
have wished because his father is serving in World War II. The
boy’s mother must be father as well as mother to James. He
learns about courage and dignity, about pain, and about the
love and will that make pain bearable. The story also shows
breaks in the color line enforced by Jim Crow laws and
customs.
How authentic are young James’s voice and point of view?
How (and why) does Gaines rely on the oral tradition of
storytelling in his fiction?
Original Audience
Gaines has said over and over again that he writes especially
for young people, with particular reference to the young whites
and, preeminently, the young blacks of the South. That is
worth exploring along with three different layers of time: (1)
the story’s time of the 1940s; (2) the writer’s time of the mid1960s; and (3) the reader’s changing moment.
Other relevant stories in Vol. 2 of the anthology include:
Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”; Wright’s “The Man Who Was
Almost a Man”; Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game”; and
McPherson’s “A Solo Song: For Doc.”
1. When does James become a man?
2. How does James come into his own voice?
Bibliography
See the special issue of Callaloo 1, no. 3 (May 1978) devoted
to Gaines and his work.
Callahan, John F. “The Landscape of Voice in Ernest J.
Gaines’s Bloodline.” Callaloo 7, no. 1 (Winter 1984):
86–112, especially pp. 86–90,
96–99.
Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995)
Contributing Editor: Sue Houchins
Some students may have difficulty with the rhythm of the
demotic language in this selection. There are a few examples
of what poet Edward Braithwaite calls “nation language,”
author Marlene Nourbese Philip calls “cultural speech or
demotic,” critic Houston Baker may term “the vernacular,”
and some may call “dialect”—or worse yet—“slang”—for
example, the term “jones,” which means habit or addiction, or
even the “My Man” of the title, which bears the double
valence of a greeting between men and the designation for a
woman’s conjugal or cohabital partner. However, some
students have more trouble with Bambara’s representation of
the conversational cadence of Miss Hazel’s speech. The first
four or five lines of the short story are a case in point. It might
be helpful, therefore, for you to read a paragraph or so aloud
and then to request a student to read a portion so that your
class can develop an ear for this language that Bambara
maintains is central to an African-American aesthetic.
In addition, students are finding it increasingly difficult
to appreciate the political issues, motivations, and strategies of
the sixties and seventies. Therefore, you might want to read
from or to place on reserve some of the essays of Eldridge
Cleaver, Claude Brown, Stokely Carmichael, or, better yet,
assign passages of Alice Walker’s Meridian. Further, you
might ask whether Miss Hazel is truly apolitical and whether
the narrative’s critique of “the Movement” is necessarily an
indictment or a repudiation of it.
Issues
This short story begs us to read and to problematize issues of
gender, race, age, and class; and to locate the intersection of
these discourses. For example, Task, Elo, and Joe Lee’s
(mis)reading of their mother’s allegedly indecorous behavior
with old blind Bovanne and her unseemly dress mark the
discursive space where gender and age collide—would Hazel’s
appearance and conduct be so egregious had she been
younger?—and where the social construction of woman as
mother denies her sexual agency—doesn’t her children’s
reaction to Hazel’s dancing withhold from her the status of
either subject or object of desire? Thus, she must deny the
erotic content of her dance: “Wasn’t about tits.” But if it
wasn’t about breasts as sensual/ sensuous organs, was it about
breasts as sources of nurture, and can the two functions be
separated? The piece asks that we reconsider the
body/bodies— female and male, young and old—and our
culture’s complex readings of them—raced, sexed, aged—as
they interact with each other, thereby constructing social
meaning—mother/daughter (“puttin a hand on my shoulder
like she hasn’t done since she left home and the hand landin
light and not sure it supposed to be there”); mother/son and
father/son (“Task run a hand over his left ear like his father for
the world and his father before that”); woman/man (not just
“sex starved [old folks],” nor just old men seeking and mature
women dispensing “Mama comfort,” but also “vibrations”
upon drum skins and a mutual “hummin” reminiscent of an
encounter with the sacred, “like you in church again”). In the
light of these constructions of the body/these touchings, how
do we understand the ritual bathing described at the end of the
story? And how do we understand the title of the short story?
Also, Miss Hazel’s body, specifically her hair, is one
textual site where race and gender are problematized. Though
Bambara, as a member of the Black Arts Movement, is one of
many African-American authors of that era seeking to define
and exemplify a black aesthetic (see Addison Gayle, The Black
Aesthetic), her fiction avoids a simplistic essentialism both
through the tropes of Hazel’s wig and cornrows as well as by
Elo’s self-censorship, her uncompleted assertion that the
generation gap is a white phenomenon.
Bambara, who has always identified herself first as a
social and political activist/community organizer, is acutely
aware of the contradictions in some so-called grassroots
movements that depend[ed] on the uncredited and unrewarded
labor of women (see Walker, Meridian, Paula Giddings, When
and Where We Enter, or Bambara, the Salt Eaters) and that
give only lip service to respecting and empowering the
disenfranchised poor, elderly, and disabled.
The Eleanor Traylor introduction to this short story stresses
the importance of black speech in and the orality of Bambara’s
work. Pay particular attention, therefore, to the
cadence/rhythm and tone of this very conversational piece, an
episode, related to the reader as if she and Miss Hazel were
talking over a cup of herb tea, embedded, as are all good oral
narratives, with pieces of other conversations among the
related incident’s participants. Appreciate as well Hazel’s
irony and wit.
Original Audience
Toni Cade Bambara, writing in the late sixties and early
seventies, is speaking to a new generation of African
Americans who are avidly reading reprinted works by black
authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
who are equally eager for each new book off the press.
Teachers in newly formed black studies departments are
beginning to educate students and their professorial colleagues
to the value of black texts and the strategies for reading them.
So Bambara can write in her highly original, but still culturally
situated, voice and expect a wide and racially diverse audience
for whom she need not translate her idiom.
In the foregoing discussion, I have already suggested Alice
Walker as an author with whom one might compare Bambara;
in addition to Meridian, there are short stories in In Love and
Trouble that treat some of the same themes. Paule Marshall’s
Brown Girl, Brownstones examines, among other things,
mother-daughter conflict, but among Caribbean immigrants in
Brooklyn. And both for the complex and subtle exploration of
the issues of race, gender, and sexuality as well as for the
lyrical linguistic cadence representing black speech, compare
Bambara with Toni Morrison.
I have already suggested some questions in the preceding
discussion of major themes; for example, one might ask
students about the significance of the title, or about the
“meaning” of the ritual bathing at the end of the story. Also,
because the persona of Miss Hazel requires students of
traditional college age to step into the skin of a more mature
adult and to empathize with their antagonist across the gender
gap, you might ask them about what they learned from this
experience.
Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)
Contributing Editor: James A. Miller
Clifton’s poetry is generally very accessible, so accessible that
careless readers may overlook the way she often achieves her
poetic effects. Her poetry is best read aloud and students
should be encouraged to read and hear her poems first, then to
explore issues of language, form, and theme.
Issues
Clifton is deeply concerned with the ways in which the weight
of racial memory and history extends into the present, with
family and community history, and with the possibilities of
transcendence and reconciliation. A deeply spiritual vein
shapes much of her poetry, which conveys a sense of wonder
and mystery as well as optimism and resilience.
Clifton’s poems seem guided by the dictates of her own
experience and consciousness rather than by any a priori sense
of form or poetic conventions. Her primary commitment is to
economical, everyday language, and to the rhythmic and
musical qualities of the language that shapes her poems.
Original Audience
Clifton’s first collection of poems, Good Times, was published
during the heyday of the Black Arts Movement and her early
work in particular owes important debts to the mood and
outlook of that period, particularly in her celebration of the
ordinary life of African Americans.
Clifton can fruitfully be compared with other AfricanAmerican women poets who emerged out of the same
historical moment—Mari Evans, June Jordan, and Sonia
Sanchez, for example—but she can also be read in conjunction
with Amiri Baraka and Etheridge Knight. Her poems can also
be compared with those of her predecessors like Langston
Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden,
and Gwendolyn Brooks. And intriguing relationships can also
be established between her works and the poems of Emily
Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
1. Discuss the domestic images in “The Thirty Eighth
Year” and “I Am Accused of Tending to the Past.” How
do images of nurturing function in these poems? What is
the relationship of these images to the consciousness
which shapes the poems?
2. Discuss the function of history in Clifton’s poems.
What, for example, is the poet seeking “at the cemetery,
walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989”? Is there
any relationship between this poem and “Reply”?
3. Discuss the relationship between “I” and “Them” in “in
white america.” Trace the development of the poem
through the final stanza and comment upon the
resolution the poem achieves.
Bibliography
Evans, Mari, ed., Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical
Evaluation,
1984, 137–161.
Golladay, Hilary. “ ‘I Am Not Grown Away from You’:
Lucille Clifton’s
Elegies for Her Mother.” CLA Journal
42 (June 1999): 430–444.
Harris, Trudier, and Thadious Davis, eds., Dictionary of
Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955,
1985, 55–60.
Ostriker, Alice. “Kin and Kin: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton.”
The American
Poetry Review 22
(November/December 1993): 41–48.
Wall, Cheryl A. “Sifting Legacies in Lucille Clifton’s
Generations.”
Contemporary Literature 40.4
(Winter 1999): 552–574.
White, Mark Bernard. “Sharing the Living Light: Rhetorical,
Poetic, and
Social Identity in Lucille Clifton.” CLA
Journal 40 (March 1997):
288–304.
N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) (b. 1934)
Contributing Editor: Kenneth M. Roemer
In several areas, teachers of Rainy Mountain are in agreement.
For example, whether an instructor uses excerpts or the entire
book (the University of New Mexico paperback is the best
classroom edition), acquainting students with a few of
Momaday’s other works can help them to establish important
thematic, generic, and cultural contexts for reading Rainy
Mountain. Especially relevant are the two sermons delivered
by the Kiowa Priest of the Sun in Momaday’s novel House
Made of Dawn (1968), the intense Oklahoma landscape
descriptions (for example, Book 3, Section 4) in Ancient Child
(1989), and Momaday’s essay “The Man Made of Words”
(available in Geary Hobson’s anthology The Remembered
Earth [1979/ 1981]), which outlines the major phases of
composition of Rainy Mountain and sets forth Momaday’s
theory of language. The excellent interviews in Charles
Woodard’s Ancestral Voice (1989), especially in the “Center
Holds” and “Wordwalker” sections, in Matthias Schubnell’s
Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (1997), offer significant
insights into Momaday’s concepts of identity and language.
Beyond recommending an acquaintance with House
Made of Dawn and “Man Made of Words,” there is little
agreement among teachers of Rainy Mountain about how
much “background” information students “need to know” in
order to “understand” Momaday’s book. This apparent
confusion can become the focus for classroom discussions of
an important question. How can works frequently omitted
from literary canons and characterized by unfamiliar subject
matter and unusual forms of expression be made accessible
and meaningful to “typical” college students? One approach to
this question is to ask students to complete their first readings
and initial discussions of the excerpts from Rainy Mountain
before they have received any background information;
students should even be discouraged from reading the
headnote in The Heath Anthology. The initial discussion can
center on questions about what type of writing the excerpts
represent (e.g., should they be in a poetry section?) and about
what types of information (if any) they think they need to
understand the excerpts.
Issues
The forms and themes of Rainy Mountain suggest numerous
other classroom strategies, many of which are described in
detail in Part Two of Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The
Way to Rainy Mountain, and in my College English essay on
teaching survey courses (37 [1976]: 619–24).
The importance of landscape in Momaday’s book also
suggests a way to bridge discussions of nineteenth-century
classic American literature and Rainy Mountain. As J. Frank
Papovich has argued in “Landscape, Tradition and Identity” in
Perspectives on Contemporary Literature (12 [1986]: 13–19),
students should be made aware that there are alternatives to the
concept of the American landscape articulated in the myth of
the isolated male hero escaping from domesticity and society
to confront the challenges of the wilderness. By contrast,
Momaday’s nature is a place teeming with intricate networks
of animal, human, and cosmic life connected by mutual
survival relationships, story-telling traditions that embrace
social gatherings at his grandmother’s house as well as the
growth of a babe into the Sun’s wife, and an imagination that
can transform an Oklahoma cricket into a being worthy of
kinship with the moon.
Autobiography, epic, sonnet, prose-poem, history, folktale,
vision, creation hymn, lyrical prose, a collection of
quintessential novels—these are a few of the labels critics,
scholars, and N. Scott Momaday have used to describe The
Way to Rainy Mountain. The four essays in the “Critical
Contexts: Forms” section of Approaches to Teaching
Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (47–77) invite
students to discuss the appropriateness of these terms.
I recommend comparisons between Momaday’s written
excerpts and parallel Kiowa oral narratives or pictorial
histories (e.g., comparing the buffalo story in XVI to the
narrative in Maurice Boyd’s Kiowa Voices, Vol. 2 [1983, 70–
73] or comparing the descriptions in XVII of how women
were treated to James Mooney’s accounts drawn from Kiowa
calendar histories in Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians
[1898, 1979: 280, 281, 294]). For other possible comparisons,
see Appendix B of my Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s
The Way to Rainy Mountain.
Within the context of American literature courses,
various comparative studies can be made between Rainy
Mountain and other more familiar works. Instructors interested
in narrative structure can compare Momaday’s discontinuous
and multivoiced text to poetic works by Edgar Lee Masters, T.
S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound and to prose works by Sherwood
Anderson and William Faulkner.
Momaday’s treatment of identity formation can be
compared to other authors’ attempts to define personae who—
because of their ethnic heritage, gender, or class status—had to
integrate creatively the apparently unrelated elements of their
mainstream and nonmainstream backgrounds and experiences.
One participatory approach to the identity issue is to require
students to select a significant landscape in their own
backgrounds and to use this selection as the basis for
composing three-voice sections modeled on the structure of
Rainy Mountain. See my “Inventive Modeling” article in
College English 46 (1984): 767–82 and Jean Molesky-Poz and
Lauren Muller’s “Native American Literatures: Pedagogies for
Engaging Student Writing,” American Quarterly (45 [1993]:
596–630).
Bibliography
Isernhagen, Hartwig, ed. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong:
Conversations on
American Indian Writing.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1999.
Lincoln, Kenneth. “Tai-me to Rainy Mountain: The Makings
of American
Indian Literature.” American Indian
Quarterly 10 (1986): 101–17.
Roemer, Kenneth M. Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The
Way to
Rainy Mountain. New York: MLA, 1989.
Schubnell, Matthias, ed. Conversations with N. Scott
Momaday. Jackson:
University Press of
Mississippi, 1997.
———. “N. Scott Momaday.” Native American Writers of the
United
States,
DLB, vol. 175, ed. Kenneth M.
Roemer. Detroit: Bruccoli,
Clark, Layman/Gale
Research, 1997, 174–86.
———. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary
Background.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1985.
Woodward, Charles L., ed. Ancestral Voice: Conversations
with N. Scott
Momaday. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989.
James Welch (Blackfeet-Gros Ventre) (b. 1940)
Welch’s fiction is immediately accessible. Students find it
powerful. They shirk from its relentlessly depressing impact,
but Welch has written Winter in the Blood, The Death of Jim
Loney, and much of his poetry to create that impact. His
writing is protest literature, so skillfully achieved that it seems
apolitical.
Sometimes hostile to the completely new, students today
seem to be willing to rely on canon choices. Once Welch is
placed for them, they respond with empathy to his fiction.
The general setting of the culture, the hardships
generations of Native Americans have learned to live with, the
socioeconomic issues make deciphering characters’ attitudes
easier. The strengths of the Indian culture need to be described
as well, because students in many parts of the country are
unfamiliar with customs, imagery, and attitudes that are
necessary in reading this excerpt.
Welch’s precision and control must be discussed.
Students must see how they are in his power throughout this
excerpt. Further, they must want to read not only this novel,
but the others as well.
Issues
It is also good to emphasize the choice of art as profession. For
Welch, giving voice to frustration has created memorable
fiction and poetry. His most recent novels, Fools Crow and
Indian Lawyer, do much more than depict the alienation of the
contemporary Native American man—but to do so, he draws
on nineteenth-century history as the basis of his plot in Fools
and a different stratum of culture for Lawyer.
Questions of realism and how realistic writing is achieved:
characterization, language, situation, emphasis on dialogue
rather than interior monologue.
Questions of appropriateness: What is believable about
the fiction, and how has Welch created that intensity that is so
believable? Why is a plot like this more germane to the lives
Welch describes than an adventurous, action-filled narrative
would have been?
Original Audience
The issue of political literature (which will occur often in
selections from the contemporary section) will need attention.
How can Welch create a sympathetic hero without portraying
the poverty and disillusion of a culture? How can he achieve
this accuracy without maligning Native Americans?
Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright are obvious choices
for comparison, but the differences are important as well.
Wright relied in many cases on dialect, with language spelled
as words might have been pronounced, and Hemingway used
carefully stylized language in his quantities of dialogue, so that
identifying characters by place or education was sometimes
difficult. Welch creates a dialect that is carefully mannered, as
if the insecure speaker had modeled his language, like his life,
on the middle-class TV image of a person and a family.
Vietnam Conflict
Michael Herr (b. 1940)
It’s probably necessary and certainly a good idea to provide
some sort of historical context for the consideration of Herr’s
work. This can be done by assigning supplementary reading or
lecturing on the history of the Vietnam War. As a Vietnam
War veteran myself, I relate my own personal experiences of
the war to students to compare with Herr’s. If you, or any
older students, have direct experience with the Vietnam era,
this is a useful approach. There are many good films about
Vietnam (both feature and documentary) that could
complement Herr’s book.
Students respond very strongly to the graphic depiction
of the inhumanity and insanity of the war. They want to know
more about the causes of the Vietnam War and the political
climate of the United States at the time.
Issues
The major themes in the excerpted passage are: the
dehumanizing and brutalizing influences of war, particularly
the way war renders soldiers incapable of functioning in
“normal” social circumstances; the relationship between the
writer’s style and presentation of the war and the drug culture
of the 1960s and 1970s; and the author’s view that the war was
fundamentally immoral, even more so than other wars. Key
here is Herr’s use of the Spanish phrase “la vida loca” (the
crazy life). On a personal level, Herr emphasizes his troubling,
even macabre, attraction to the war, its combination of
bloodshed, madness, camaraderie, and heroism.
Dispatches is an extraordinary work stylistically, a brilliant
execution of the speaking styles of young American soldiers:
fast paced, full of slang, very much shaped by popular culture
(films, television, rock and roll music) and the drug culture.
Herr is also adept at capturing the officialese of the U.S.
military establishment. Many of the formal and stylistic
qualities of Dispatches connect Herr to postmodernism.
Original Audience
Dispatches is a very contemporary book in terms of its values
and its points of view. It is a book about young men written by
a young man.
Herr’s work can be compared to that of other writers about the
Vietnam War and with the so-called “new journalists” such as
Tom Wolfe. The second connection is especially interesting.
Students might note how Herr uses literary/fictional
techniques—figurative language, characterization, narrative
development—in what is ostensibly, as indicated by the title, a
work of journalism. Students might look at other treatments of
the Vietnam War— both fictional and journalistic—to
compare points of view about the war, its impact on the
humanity of the soldiers, etc.
1. What is the author’s attitude toward the war? What are
the effects of the war on human behavior? From your
knowledge, is Herr’s position on the war widely shared?
2. How would you describe Herr’s style? In what ways is
Herr’s style compatible (or not) with its subject? From
what sources does Herr draw his images, his metaphors?
How does this compare with the practices of other
writers? In what sense is the notion of “la vida loca”
symbolic of both the literary situation and the temper of
the times?
Bibliography
Other books on Vietnam are very useful. I recommend:
Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining
Lie, Wallace Terry’s Bloods, and Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of
War.
Tim O’Brien (b. 1946)
Contributing Editor: Alex Vernon
With each passing year, the American war in Vietnam recedes
further from our collective memory. Our current
undergraduates were born roughly ten years after the United
States pulled its troops out of Southeast Asia in 1975. Their
images of that conflict largely come from such movies as
Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and
Platoon (1986). Providing some historical context seems a
necessity, especially as Tim O’Brien himself rejects the
popular image of the Vietnam War promoted by these movies.
Michael Bibby has recently argued that the Vietnam War is
constitutive of the postmodern condition, and while I disagree,
finding the origins of postmodernism predating the war and
not restricted to the American scene, Bibby rightly reminds us
of the deep and lasting influence of that divisive war in U.S.
culture (The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, 1999).
One strategy then is to first discuss the historical
context, and then address O’Brien’s artistic response as
illustrated by “In the Field”—perhaps alongside the artistic
response of other veterans included in this anthology. Several
resources on teaching the war are listed in the bibliography
below. Some concise historical introductions to the war
include George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The
United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (2nd ed., 1986);
Anthony Edmonds, The War In Vietnam (1998); Thomas D.
Boettcher, Vietnam: The Valor and the Sorrow (1985); Phillip
B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975
(1988); William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A
Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975 (1986, 1987);
James Joes, The War for South Vietnam: 1954–1975 (1989);
George Donelson Moss, Vietnam: An American Ordeal
(1990). Less work for you and perhaps more interesting for the
students might be to show a short film, such as the CBS
production Vietnam: Chronicle of a War (1981; 88 minutes).
To help students appreciate O’Brien’s attitude toward the war,
consider reviewing with them one of his early essays on the
subject, “The Violent Vet” (Esquire, Dec. 1979). Among other
things, that essay criticizes Hollywood’s depiction of the war’s
madness as being inaccurate and too simple an explanation,
one that relieves us of the duty of serious retrospection. It also
argues for the universality of the soldier’s war experience to
counter the myth of the Vietnam War as somehow aberrant.
You might provide to students the other stories in The
Things They Carried related to Kiowa’s death (“Speaking of
Courage” and “Notes”; less directly, “Field Trip”), and ask
students to reflect on how these stories either challenge or
reinforce the themes and style of “In the Field.” O’Brien’s
most anthologized pieces, “The Things They Carried” and
“How to Tell a True War Story” (both in Things), are easily
accessible, and afford other points of comparison and insight.
The other significant reading that can lead to fruitful
discussion is the chapter “July” in O’Brien’s war memoir If I
Die in a Combat Zone. O’Brien has described his artistic
method as a mixing of memory and imagination, and clearly
he transformed the real event described in this chapter to
create the fictional situation of Kiowa’s death. In “How to Tell
a True War Story,” he asserts that factual occurrence may be
less true than a story that never happened. Do students agree
that “In the Field,” despite its status as fiction, strikes more
deeply at the war’s truth than does the nonfiction account in
“July”?
Finally, studying literature from Vietnam offers an
excellent opportunity for personal interaction between students
and veterans. Finding veterans to bring into class should not be
difficult. I have had students for whom reading O’Brien
enabled them, for the first time in their lives, to talk with
veterans close to them, like fathers and uncles, about the war.
Colleagues of mine have arranged for students to interview
veterans through the local Department of Veterans Affairs, and
to turn those interviews into meaningful essays.
Issues
1. The two major themes of “In the Field” are interrelated
and involve every American’s moral responsibility for
waging the war. First, the story makes quite explicit that
both everybody and nobody bear the blame for Kiowa’s
death: the headquarters for assigning the platoon to set
up in the shit field, the lieutenant for failing to disobey a
bad order, the North Vietnamese for firing the mortars,
the anonymous young soldier for shining his flashlight
on a picture of a girl (perhaps the girl herself for
inspiring the picture, inspiring the soldier to carry it and
share it, and perhaps whoever took the photograph),
Azar for making jokes, the weather and the river and the
villagers for creating the shit field, even “an old man in
Omaha” for forgetting to vote. Second, Kiowa’s getting
sucked into the shit field becomes a metaphor for the
U.S.’s getting sucked into the quagmire that was the
Vietnam War. By extension, everybody and nobody bear
the blame for the war. The anonymous soldier, in this
context, might be read as a kind of Everyman.
2. O’Brien’s writing career circles around the personal
issue of his own moral accountability. He did not agree
with the war, and modestly protested it during college.
Yet he allowed himself to be drafted—he neither found
a legal way to dodge the draft nor did he take the illegal
and bolder option of fleeing to Canada. Partially, he
allowed himself to be drafted because he felt he “owed”
his small Minnesota town. “For twenty-one years I’d
lived under its laws, accepted its education, eaten its
food, wasted and guzzled its water, slept well at night,
driven across its highways, dirtied and breathed its air,
wallowed in its luxuries” (If I Die). In other words, he
felt the obligation of a social contract. Perhaps “In the
Field” can be read against O’Brien’s persistent moral
struggle. On one level, by acknowledging the soldier’s
function as agent of the state and society, O’Brien shifts
some of the blame and guilt off himself. On another
level, by shifting blame away from soldiers, he admits
that he could never have completely avoided some
responsibility for the war even if he had managed to
evade combat duty. As he writes in “How to Tell a True
Story,” in a slightly different context, “the only certainty
is overwhelming ambiguity.”
3. In interview after interview, O’Brien has insisted that his
war stories aren’t only about the war, sometimes not
about the war at all, but he uses the immediacy, drama,
and ambiguity of his war experience to explore issues
more universal to the human condition. “In the Field” is
not the best example of this, though we can somewhat
broaden the story’s themes and achieve wider
applicability. The web of contributing causes to Kiowa’s
death suggest the complex and ultimately indeterminate
causality of any event. It proposes the degree to which
we are all responsible to one another. Finally, by shifting
its perspective among the soldiers, the story dramatizes
the subjective nature of all experience, not just war.
1. “In the Field” constantly shifts the storytelling
perspective among the soldiers. This structural decision
reinforces the story’s meaning or moral, specifically
how Kiowa’s death—and the war itself and everything
about it—are both nobody’s and everybody’s fault.
“Speaking of Courage” and “Notes” extend this
technique by adding the voices of Norman Bowker and
the book’s narrator (named “Tim O’Brien”). Bringing
these two voices into class discussion might help
students better understand Norman’s role in this story,
and the final line in “Notes” adds another dimension to
the ambiguity of complicity. In discussing Norman
Bowker’s story and the actions Bowker took that might
have contributed to Kiowa’s death, “Tim O’Brien”
states that “that part of the story is my own.” Does he
mean that he, the narrator, took the actions the other
story attributes to Bowker, or does he mean that he, the
narrator, the author of Bowker’s tale, invented the entire
thing?
2. This shifting of perspectives also enhances the story’s
realism by providing a kind of fog of war reading
experience—a technique employed in other twentiethcentury war fiction, like Shelby Foote’s Shiloh (1952)
and Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels (1974). The very
bare, direct language reinforces the story’s realism;
indeed since Hemingway and the other major post–Great
War prose authors, such stark, “realistic” language
seems almost a requisite for war fiction. Even with
O’Brien’s more fantastic war novel, Going After
Cacciato, he insists upon a realistic rendering of a
soldier’s flight of fancy while passing the time on guard
duty.
3. The story begins in the middle of the search for Kiowa
(in medias res), and refuses to proceed chronologically.
This places the reader into the story instantly, and pulls
the reader along by unfolding the facts piecemeal. The
story in fact has no climax; the most climactic event of
this story (and “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes”),
Kiowa’s death, occurs beforehand. By refusing to
include a climax as the turning point of the plot, O’Brien
further reconstructs any sense of simple causality. The
nonlinear, even recursive nature of the narrative reflects
the nonlinear, even recursive experience of the Vietnam
War and war in general. In this story, three soldiers
discover Kiowa’s rucksack and begin “circling out”
from there to look for his body, perhaps serving as a
metaphor for this narrative method.
4. “In the Field” ’s realism makes it challenging to discuss
O’Brien in the context of stylistic postmodernism. If
postmodernism constitutes an important part of your
course, I would strongly recommend having your
students read “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes.”
These stories have a metafictional element through the
“Tim O’Brien” narrator, a character who is distinct from
the author even though both have apparently authored
some of the same stories and have nearly identical
biographies.
5. The Things They Carried had a peculiar composition
process. Many of the pieces were written and published
individually over the course of several years. When
O’Brien decided to make a collection, he wrote new
pieces, modified a number of the original ones, and
ordered them in a very deliberate sequence. The result is
a book that falls somewhere between a novel and a story
collection. If it fits your pedagogical goals, invite your
students to compare the original versions of these stories
with the book’s versions (e.g., “Speaking of Courage,”
Massachusetts Review 17 [1976]).
Original Audience
O’Brien’s moral and his direct language suggest that he wants
to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. He has expressed
some dissatisfaction that war fiction does not tend to attract
women readers. The most meaningful feedback on his work
comes from women who tell him that he communicated the
war experience to them better than anyone, and helped them
understand the veterans in their lives. “The joy is not the joy of
touching veterans or touching people who have lived what you
have lived,” O’Brien has said in an interview. “The joy is just
the opposite . . . because the purpose of art is to touch the
human heart in its solidarity and solidity.” This is not to say
that O’Brien writes specifically for women, rather that he tries
to make his fiction accessible, enjoyable, and meaningful for
all readers.
1. Compare and contrast the O’Brien selection with those
by other Vietnam veterans included in this anthology,
especially Robert Bly’s war poems. The significant
exercise here is in contrasting the messages and the
styles of the authors, for by distinguishing them we can
begin to reconstruct the clichéd images, popular
conceptions, and common stereotypes about that war. In
contrasting O’Brien and Herr, it might help to inform
students that the latter contributed to the screenplays of
both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket (for
O’Brien’s feelings about the Hollywood image of the
Vietnam Veteran, see “The Violent Vet” [Esquire, Dec.
1979]).
2. Compare the O’Brien story with pieces (especially
stories) by veterans from other wars, like Hemingway.
Does the modern war experience tend to generate a
“realist” style?
3. You might also compare this story’s style with that of
contemporary stories in this anthology, specifically the
more postmodern stories like John Barth’s. I would
recommend reading additional works by O’Brien
(intelligent selections from The Things They Carried,
such as “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes”) if you want
a solid inquiry of O’Brien in a postmodern context.
O’Brien’s status as a postmodern stylist is, I believe,
very debatable, and may help to focus more general
definitional discussions.
4. Students interested in film might want to compare
Apocalypse Now with A Soldier’s Sweetheart (1998), a
fairly faithful screen adaptation of O’Brien’s
“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (in Things), with
Kiefer Sutherland as Rat Kiley and Georgina Cates as
Mary Anne, and the only film of any O’Brien work.
Both movies are in dialogue with Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness.
5. A few of the canonized Vietnam novels to which you
might direct interested students (or add to your syllabus)
are O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978), Robert
Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974), Stephen Wright’s
Meditations in Green (1983), John M. Del Vecchio’s
The Thirteenth Valley (1982), Larry Heinemann’s
Paco’s Story (1986), and William Eastlake’s The
Bamboo Bed (1969). Poets include John Balaban, W. D.
Ehrhart, Walter McDonald, Bruce Weigl, and Yusef
Komunyakaa. David Rabe is the most prominent
dramatist.
Questions for Reading and Discussion
1. What kills Kiowa? Is it any one event or exact sequence
of events?
2. Elsewhere in The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes
that a “true war story is never moral. It does not instruct,
nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper
human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things
men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not
believe it” (“How to Tell a True War Story”). Does this
story support that assertion? If not, what moral or morals
does it propose? Is the assertion that “a true war story is
never moral” itself a kind of moral, a declaration of
value?
3. How does the story serve as a metaphor for something
bigger? In other words, might we equate the shit field
that sucks in Kiowa with the war?
4. This story is an imaginative reinvention of an actual
episode that occurred during O’Brien’s tour of duty in
Vietnam. For O’Brien, happening-truth (what actually
happened) can be less true than story-truth (what only
happened in fiction). The fictional status of this story
(and the book) bothers some readers—it diminishes its
power. Do these readers have a higher expectation of
actuality for works about the Vietnam War, and if that is
the case, why? Do any students agree with O’Brien’s
artistic philosophy?
5. In other writings O’Brien has observed that when the
enemy is so thoroughly mixed in with the local civilian
population, and when the enemy lives in the villages,
hides in the jungle, and tunnels underground, it seems
that the land itself becomes “the true enemy—the
physical place, the soil and the paddies” (“The Vietnam
in Me”). How does this help explain the lieutenant’s
choice to set his escapist fantasies on a golf course?
6. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross calls the anonymous young
soldier “not a man, really,” but “a boy.” The average age
for soldiers in Vietnam was about the same age as
traditional undergraduates. Do any of your students have
siblings or friends who enlisted in the military instead of
going to college? Would any of your students consider
joining the service? Would any of them refuse to serve?
Would it depend upon the war? How has Vietnam, the
Gulf War, and recent war movies (e.g., Saving Private
Ryan) affected your students’ feelings about war and
military duty? Such questions get at the heart of
O’Brien’s concerns, and do it in a very personal way.
7. Kiowa is a Native American. What might O’Brien be
suggesting by this fact?
Approaches to Writing
1. Students often have very immediate and strong
responses to O’Brien’s short stories. Ask students to
record their responses, and use their writing to explore
those responses.
2. Encourage students to talk with a veteran, either a
family member, a family friend, or a stranger. A
personal encounter can lead to a third-person retelling of
the veteran’s story or a first-person reflection on the
encounter. Alternatively, ask students to research and
write about a soldier who did not return from Vietnam,
either as a result of being killed or missing in action.
3. Have students write a formal essay comparing any two
(or more) of the texts mentioned in this guide (two
stories, different versions of the same story, story with
essay, different writers, etc.). Similarly, have students
write a formal essay exploring any of the discussion
prompts in this guide.
4. Images from the Vietnam War—still photos or motion
films—are readily available. Ask students to compare
how different artistic forms (fiction, creative nonfiction,
visual arts) work to generate different responses.
Hollywood’s response to the war also gives an excellent
opportunity for student reflection in writing.
Bibliography
Dunn, Joe P. Teaching the Vietnam War: Resources and
Assessments.
Occasional Paper Series No. 18. Ed. Udo
Heyn. Los Angeles:
California State University,
Center for the Study of Armament and
Disarmament,
1990.
Gilbert, Marc Jason. Ed. The Vietnam War: Teaching
Approaches and
Resources. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1991.
Johannessen, Larry R. Illumination Rounds: Teaching the
Literature of the
Vietnam War. Urbana, IL: National
Council of Teachers of English,
1992.
Kelsey, Ann L., ed., with Anthony O. Edmonds. Resources for
Teaching the
Vietnam War: An Annotated Guide, rev. ed.
Pittsburgh: Center for
Social Studies Education,
1996.
McNerney, Brian C. “Responsibly Inventing History: An
Interview with Tim
O’Brien.” War, Literature &
the Arts 6.2 (Fall/Winter 1994): 1–26.
O’Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship
Me Home.
New York: Delacorte, 1973; New York,
Broadway Books, 1999.
———. “The Vietnam in Me.” The New York Times
Magazine. Cover
Story. 2 Oct. 1994: 48–57.
Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
Contributing Editor: Barry H. Leeds
To begin with, any approach to teaching Norman Mailer’s
work must take into consideration his flamboyant and
controversial public image, which often obscures critical
responses to the works. Amazingly, many college students will
not recognize Mailer’s name at first; but those who do will
very probably be armored in negative preconceptions, often
based on incomplete or erroneous information.
The selections from The Armies of the Night presented
in the anthology provide an opportunity to deal effectively
with this issue: Mailer is ultimately shown, not as an
unconscionable egotist presenting himself as his own hero, but
as a rather self-deprecating narrator/ protagonist. For example,
crossing the line of MP’s in his act of civil disobedience, he
describes himself as a somewhat ridiculous figure.
“It was his dark pinstripe suit, his vest . . . the barrel
chest, the early paunch—he must have looked like a banker
himself, a banker, gone ape!” (pp. 150–151, Signet edition).
Again, before being arrested, Mailer feels, almost
unwillingly, that “a deep modesty was on its way to him . . . as
well as fear, yes now he saw it, fear of the consequences of
this weekend in Washington” (Signet, p. 93).
This emerging new sense of self leads to a crucial
realization: “No, the only revolutionary truth was a gun in the
hills, and that would not be his, he would be too old by then,
and too incompetent, yes, too incompetent said the new
modesty, and too showboat, too lacking in essential judgment”
(Signet, p. 94).
Yet despite the constant interplay here (as in his life and
work as a whole) between the performer and the thoughtful
commentator, what looms far larger is Mailer’s evocative
capacity to strike to the heart of an issue of national
significance in his prose. Consider the forceful and moving
conclusion to The Armies of the Night, entitled “The Metaphor
Delivered” (Signet, p. 320).
The unusual point of view used in this book, which was
to become a hallmark of Mailer’s nonfiction of the 1970s,
provides interesting possibilities for a discussion of point of
view and genre.
Issues
The historical themes are obvious from the nature of The
Armies of the Night and its relationship to the Vietnam War.
Mailer’s preoccupation with existential choice, personal
courage, and integrity are evident in the passages selected.
As I have explained in my headnote, Mailer’s development
from a derivative and naturalistic vision in The Naked and the
Dead (1948) to a unique and highly existential one in later
works such as An American Dream (1965) is evident in The
Armies of the Night. The concept of the “nonfiction novel” and
the unusual third-person participant/narrator point of view are
important in any discussion of Armies and Mailer’s subsequent
work.
Original Audience
It is interesting and important to discuss the significance (or
perceived insignificance) of those events recounted in The
Armies of the Night to today’s students. Further, my footnotes
will to some degree ameliorate unfamiliarity with particular
people or events.
Parallels can be drawn to Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of
Africa (1935), Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(1968) and even The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
Further, Mailer’s early work, notably The Naked and the Dead
(1948) was influenced profoundly by James T. Farrell, John
Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck.
1. Do you find Mailer’s use of himself as a third-person
participant effective or confusing? This book, which
won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award,
has often been cited, along with Tom Wolfe’s The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) as an example of the
“new journalism.” But a similar point of view was used
by Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams as
early as 1907, and the concept of a “nonfiction novel”
dates back at least as far as Ernest Hemingway’s Green
Hills of Africa (1935). Does this relatively unusual form
attract or repel you?
2. Mailer writes (Signet, p. 63): “The American
corporation executive . . . was perfectly capable of
burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese
jungles, yet felt a large displeasure and fairly final
disapproval at the generous use of obscenity in literature
and public.” Do you agree with Mailer that
depersonalized governmental violence is more obscene
that the use of four-letter words?
3. Consider Mailer’s final statements in “The Metaphor
Delivered.” Do you feel that Mailer, despite his antiwar
civil disobedience, is a patriot? Do the U.S. Marshals
who think him a traitor love their country more? Were
you emotionally moved by this conclusion?
4. These events took place more than thirty years ago. Do
they seem to have any bearing on your life, and on the
America you live in today, or do they seem like ancient
history? Are the participants (e.g., Robert Lowell,
Dwight MacDonald) familiar or alien to you?
5. Can you envision any future national situation in which
similar demonstrations might occur? Are there any that
you might find justifiable?
Bibliography
“The Armies of the Night,” in The Structured Vision of
Norman Mailer by Barry H. Leeds (NYU Press, 1969) seems
to help render the book more accessible to my students.
Chapter 8. Also:
Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Critical Essays on Norman Mailer.
Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1986.
Manso, Peter. Mailer: His Life and Times. New York: Simon
and Schuster,
1985.
Robert Bly (b. 1926)
Teaching material for Robert Bly is available on The Heath
Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)
Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the oldest of five children,
Komunyakaa was the son of a carpenter and of a mother who
bought a set of encyclopedias for her children. When he was
sixteen, he discovered James Baldwin’s essays and decided to
become a writer himself.
From 1965 to 1968, Komunyakaa served a tour of duty
in Vietnam as an information specialist, editing a military
newspaper called the Southern Cross. There he won the bronze
star. After military service, he enrolled at the University of
Colorado as a double major in English and sociology, where
he began writing poetry. Upon graduation in 1980, he studied
further at both Colorado State University (where he received
the M.A. in Creative Writing) and the University of California,
Irvine, where he received an MFA. He then taught at various
universities before moving to New Orleans. While teaching at
the University of New Orleans, in 1985, he married Australian
novelist Mandy Sayer.
Only then, nearly twenty years after his Vietnam
experiences, did Komunyakaa write his important war poems,
published in 1988 as Dien Cai Dau. The violence of war, the
pain of identifying with the Vietnamese, and the anguish of
returning to the States had seldom been so eloquently and
hauntingly expressed. By 1994, when these poems were
included in Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977–
1989, Komunyakaa had already won two creative writing
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
San Francisco Poetry Center Award, and had held the Lilly
Professorship of Poetry at Indiana University. Neon
Vernacular received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as
the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award from the Claremont
Graduate School, and as a result his earlier eight collections of
work have been reevaluated.
In 1998 his poetry collection Thieves of Paradise was a
finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award, and
that same year saw the publication of his recording, Love
Notes from the Madhouse. In 2000, Radicloni Clytus edited a
book of Komunyakaa’s prose, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews,
and Commentaries, for the University of Michigan Press
series. In an essay from that collection, “Control Is the
Mainspring,” the poet writes,
I learned that the body and the mind are
indeed connected: good writing is physical
and mental. I welcomed the knowledge of this
because I am from a working-class people
who believe that physical labor is sacred and
spiritual.
This combination of the realistic and the spiritual runs
throughout Komunyakaa’s poems, whether they are about his
childhood, the father-son relationship, the spiritual journey
each of us takes—alone, and in whatever circumstances life
hands us—and the various conflicts of war. He has become an
important poet for our times.
Bibliography
Dedications and Other Darkhorses, 1977; Lost in the
Bonewheel Factory, 1979; Copacetic, 1984; I Apologize for
the Eyes in My Head, 1986; Toys in the Field, 1987; Dien Cai
Dau, 1988; February in Sydney, 1989; Magic City, 1992; Neon
Vernacular, 1994; Thieves of Paradise, 1998; Blue Notes:
Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, ed. Radicloni Clytus,
2000.
Carolyn Forché (b. 1950)
Contributing Editor: Constance Coiner
Because two of the five poems included in this anthology
appear in the section The Country Between Us (TCBU ) titled
“In Salvador, 1978–80,” students will need some introduction
to the situation in El Salvador at the time when Forché went
there as a journalist/poet/human rights investigator. My
students have been curious about the U.S. role in El Salvador’s
twelve-year civil war that ended with a United Nations (U.N.)brokered peace accord on January 1, 1992. In “A Lesson in
Commitment” (TriQuarterly [Winter 1986]: 30–38) Forché
recounts the events that led to her going to El Salvador—an
interesting, even amusing story that students will welcome.
Forché’s “El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire” (The American
Poetry Review [July/August 1981]: 3–7), which both prefaces
and theoretically frames the “El Salvador” poems, is essential
to students’ understanding “The Colonel” and “Because One Is
Always Forgotten.”
Findings of the U.N.-sponsored “truth commission,”
which investigated some of the worst human rights abuses of
the twelve-year civil war, appear, for example, in The New
York Times—“U.N. Report Urges Sweeping Changes in
Salvador Army” (March 16, 1993, A1 and A12) and “How
U.S. Actions Helped Hide Salvador Human Rights Abuses”
(March 21, 1993, Section 1, pages 1 and 10). Consider also
“The Military Web of Corruption,” The Nation (October 23,
1982, 391–03), by Forché and Leonel Gomez. Students could
also profit from renting on their own or your showing clips
from Romero, a 1989 film directed by John Duigan and
featuring Raul Julia as Monsignor Oscar Romero, the
Archbishop of San Salvador to whom Forché dedicated the
eight “El Salvador poems.” (Romero was murdered by a death
squad in 1980 while saying mass at a hospital for the
terminally ill.)
Students and teachers who want more background on El
Salvador’s history and the country’s political and economic
conditions can consult the following: El Salvador: Another
Vietnam (1981), a fifty-minute documentary produced and
directed by Glenn Silber and Tete Vasconcellos; Robert
Armstrong and Janet Shenk’s El Salvador: The Face of
Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982); A Decade of
War: El Salvador Confronts the Future, eds. Anjli Sundaram
and George Gelber (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991);
and the North American Congress on Latin America
(NACLA), an independent organization founded to analyze
and report on Latin America and U.S. foreign policy toward
Latin America. NACLA (475 Riverside Drive, Room 454,
New York, NY 10115; 212-870-3146) publishes a journal and
has a library open to the public.
I strongly recommend addressing the controversy in the
U.S. concerning “political poetry,” perhaps at the beginning
and then at the end of your discussion of Forché’s poems.
Forché herself addresses this controversy briefly in “El
Salvador: An Aide Mémoire.” Forché’s poetry and her views
point to differences between formalist and “cultural studies”
approaches to literature, differences that can also be usefully
discussed in relation to other writers assigned in your course.
An audiocassettes of Forché reading from TCBU is
available from Watershed Tapes, P.O. Box 50145,
Washington, D.C. 20004. Students respond favorably to
hearing Forché read the poems. I also ask for volunteers to
read the poems aloud. They have done so effectively,
especially if given a few days to prepare.
“The Colonel”
Forché invented the term “documentary poem” for “The
Colonel.” This alternative form works partly because she
sparingly employs traditional poetic forms as touchstones
within it and partly because its seeming “artlessness” elicits
belief from her readers.
In the journalistic way that it sets the scene, “The
Colonel” takes little poetic license, inviting readers to trust that
it has not caricatured the truth. Its simple, declarative
sentences do not resemble poetic lines. Even visually, with its
justified right-hand margin, the piece resembles a newspaper
report more than a poem. In the twentieth century, the lyric has
become by far the dominant poetic form, but because Forché
wants her readers to experience what she witnessed in El
Salvador from 1978 to 1980, she consciously resists lyricizing
the experience. Before turning to Forché’s poems, I define and
provide examples of well-known lyrical poems so students can
better understand how she subverts traditional lyrical poetry.
Forché first draws us into “The Colonel” by conversing
with us about the rumors that have crept north of brutal Latin
American military dictatorships: “WHAT YOU HAVE
HEARD is true.” Forché extends that sense of familiarity for
her reader by creating in the first lines a scene that, except for
the pistol on the cushion, could occur in any North American
home: The wife serves coffee, the daughter files her nails, the
son goes out for the evening; there are daily papers, pet dogs, a
TV turned on even at meal time. The minutiae of ordinary
domestic life draw us into the scene, as if we’re entering the
room with Forché; we feel as if we’re having dinner with the
colonel.
“The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house”
is one of two figures foregrounded in the poem, and Forché
deliberately draws attention to its artfulness. Although the
image is ominous, suggestive generally of the gothic and
particularly of a swinging interrogation lamp or of someone
hanging naked from a rope, it is too decorative for its place
between a pistol and a cop show, thus announcing itself as art.
The following lines portray the colonel’s house as a
fortress: “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around
the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those
in liquor stores.” The outside of this fortress, constructed to
mutilate anyone who tries to get inside, stands in stark contrast
to the several images of “civilization” and affluence inside,
such as “dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell [that]
was on the table for calling the maid.”
Until the parrot says hello from the terrace, triggering
the colonel’s anger and the action of the poem—that is, his
spilling human ears on the table—the poem is a string of the
verbs “to be.” As passive as her verbs, the poet can only
catalog nouns, unable to exercise control or take action. In
fact, her friend warns her with his eyes: “say nothing.” And so,
many readers identify with the poet rather than feel
manipulated by her; like us, she is frightened, wary. (Students
may be surprised to learn that Forché did not invent the
Colonel’s displaying severed ears as a startling, violent
metaphor. The incident actually occurred, she has reported.)
Note the contrast between the single stylized line, “the
moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,” and the
numerous declarative, weak-verb sentences
There were daily papers . . .
On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls . . .
On the windows there were gratings like those in
liquor
stores.
This contrast between the stylized line and the weak-verb
sentences suggests the range of possible responses to situations
such as dinner with the colonel as well as the range of possible
responses to reading about dinner with the colonel: Will the
poet remain impotent, unable to invent strong verbs—in other
words, be unable to take action? Do more appropriate
responses exist? Forché thus puts her readers in her place, in
that room with the colonel, in a state of nascent political and
moral awareness. The form itself suggests that we must make
choices and take positions, not only as we read “The Colonel”
but also as we respond to military dictatorships and to our
government’s support of them.
With the poem’s second foregrounded figure, a simile
describing the ears as “dried peach halves,” the poet at once
manipulates the mundane and is confined by it. She knows we
have all seen dried fruit and so she could not more vividly
describe those severed ears, but she apologizes for the limits of
her inherited poetic and for the limits of language itself,
acknowledging simply: “There is no other way to say this.”
However, she also defends poetic language here. Because
“there is no other way to say this,” she must rely on a poetic
device, a simile, to communicate with us.
The colonel shakes one of the ears in the faces of his
guests. A human ear is an unusual—an even extraordinary—
metonymy, as Forché well knows. It stands for the Salvadoran
people, for those who have been mutilated and murdered as
well as for those who continue to resist the military
dictatorship. It might be helpful to students to think of the
colonel’s actions as a perverse magic show. He is able to make
a severed ear come “alive” by dropping it into a glass of water,
just as the death squads are able to make Salvadorans
disappear. The sweeping gesture (“He swept the ears to the
floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air”) is
theatrical and sends the ears down to the floor while the
colonel elevates his glass of wine. The glass of wine carries us
back to the “good wine” at dinner and the other markers of the
affluent life maintained within the colonel’s fortress at the
expense of the extreme poverty outside. The glass of wine,
then, is a metonymy for all the trappings of “civilization” we
have seen in the colonel’s fortress and for the power of the
military over ordinary Salvadorans. And as the ears of
ordinary Salvadorans go down to the floor, that wineglass, that
metonymy for the affluence of the few, is hoisted triumphantly
above them.
With this theatrical action come the colonel’s climactic
words: “Something for your poetry, no?” Most immediately,
“Something” refers to the grand theatrical show the colonel
has put on for his guests’ “entertainment.” But the colonel’s
ironic sneer also mocks Forché’s position as a North American
poet, drawing attention to the belief held by many North
Americans that poetry has certain “proper” subjects, and that
mutilation—and by extension politics—are not among them.
Since the eighteenth century, mainstream North America has
lost touch with the sense of literature as political catalyst.
Nineteenth-century romanticism and some twentieth-century
poetry promoted by New Criticism has been especially
individualized, introspective, and self-referential. In “A Lesson
in Commitment” Forché recalls how Leonel Gomez Vides
tried to persuade her to come to El Salvador, asking her, “Do
you want to write poetry about yourself for the rest of your
life?” Forché, who came to understand Gomez Vides’s point,
believes that the “twentieth century human condition demands
a poetry of witness” (“El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire”).
Now look at the poem’s final lines: “Some of the ears on
the floor caught this scarp of his voice. Some of the / ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.” Some of the ears seem
to be alive, even though the colonel didn’t believe for a minute
during his mock magic show that he was actually bringing a
dead ear back to life. Some of the ears seem to be listening and
feeling for vibrations, for sounds and motion of resistance to
the colonel’s fortress. This poem, especially these concluding
lines, implicitly questions the reader: Is your ear pressed to the
ground? Are you listening? Have you “HEARD” (to return to
the poem’s opening words, written for emphasis in
uppercase)? Are you responding to and involving yourself in
resistance to the brutality of this colonel and others like him?
“Because One Is Always Forgotten”
This poem makes an excellent pedagogical companion piece to
“The Colonel.” As in her documentary poem, Forché writes in
calculated relation to bourgeois forms, calling attention to the
limits of inherited poetic forms and at the same time insisting
that poetry can be used for political as well as aesthetic
purposes. The obverse of “The Colonel,” which appears
artless, this elegy is the most highly structured piece in TCBU.
Before turning to “Because One Is Always Forgotten,” I define
the elegy and provide examples of well-known elegies.
Forché wrote “Because One Is Always Forgotten” in
memory of José Rudolfo Viera, who was Salvador’s Deputy of
Agrarian Reform under President Napoleon Duarte. (If
teachers have read aloud excerpts from “A Lesson in
Commitment” or made copies available, students will recall
that Leonel Gomez Vides visited Forché in San Diego, urging
her to come to El Salvador; Gomez Vides was Viera’s
assistant Deputy for Agrarian Reform.) Viera discovered that
money that had been designated for agrarian reform (that is, an
attempt to divide some of the largest landholdings so that most
of the country’s wealth would no longer reside in the hands of
a few families) was being pocketed by members of Duarte’s
administration and men high up in the military. Some of that
money was coming from the Carter administration in the U.S.,
from U.S. taxpayers, and going not toward agrarian reform but
to support the expensive tastes of a few. Think for a moment
of words from “The Colonel”—rack of lamb, good wine, a
gold bell for calling the maid. Think for a moment, too, of
Forché’s words in “El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire”: “I was
taken to the homes of landowners, with their pools set like
aquamarines in the clipped grass, to the afternoon games of
canasta over quaint local pupusas and tea, where parrots hung
by their feet among the bougainvillea and nearly everything
was imported, if only from Miami or New Orleans.”
Viera, who reported the corruption on news televised in
San Salvador, was murdered by “the White Glove,” a rightwing death squad. Viera was shot along with two North
Americans, Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, who were
in El Salvador as consultants for agrarian reform. At the time
of the murders, the three men were having a meal in the
Sheraton Hotel dining room in San Salvador. No one was
arrested, much less brought to trial, for the murder of the three
men. Some North American newspapers reported the deaths of
Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, but because Viera’s
death was not included in those reports, Forché felt the need to
memorialize Viera.
“Because One Is Always Forgotten” tightly compresses
rhythm and images, suggesting that traditional forms
necessarily strain or snap under the weight of political
imprisonment, murder, mutilation. After the second line, the
lines start “losing” beats, as if atrocities in Salvador defy even
one more word or beat. Forché undercuts the stylization that
would comfort us, that would provide the consolation and
closure that elegies have traditionally provided.
She also uses “heart,” a word common in poetry, in a
way that is the opposite of what we expect.
I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a
campesino
and he would cut it up and give it back:
you can’t eat heart in those four dark
chambers where a man can be kept years.
“You can’t eat heart” is a spondee—all unaccented syllables
have been removed. A spondee represents language at its most
compressed, its most structured, because English is more
naturally a combination of accented and unaccented syllables.
“You can’t eat heart” also announces the limitations of poetic
language. You can’t eat it. It cannot, literally, sustain human
life. In other words, an elegy, however necessary, is not a
sufficient response to events such as those in El Salvador.
Students may volunteer that “those four dark chambers”
refer to the left and right ventricles and the left and right
auricles of the heart. But unless they have read “The Visitor,”
one of Forché’s “El Salvador” poems not included in The
Heath Anthology, they won’t know that “dark chambers” also
refers to “la oscura” (the dark place), a prison within a prison
that inspired “The Visitor.” Forché describes “la oscura”—
where men were kept in boxes, one meter by one meter, with
barred openings the size of a book—in her introduction to
“The Visitor” on the Watershed audiocassette; she also
describes “la oscura” in “El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire.”
Now look at the following lines from the fourth stanza:
A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife
to peel the face from a dead man
The second line of this stanza stops abruptly; again, it is as if
the atrocities in Salvador defy even one more word or beat.
“To peel the face from a dead man” is no more an invented
metaphor than “The Colonel” ’s severed ears; in Salvador
Forché actually saw human faces hanging from tree branches.
Too often we have been taught to expect hearts and flowers
from poetry, sometimes used sentimentally, but such
sentimentality is turned on its head here. “Flowering with such
faces” uses conventional poetic language in an extraordinary
way.
Ask students what they make of the last, paradoxical
stanza: “The heart is the toughest part of the body / Tenderness
is in the hands.” This stanza asks readers to examine
something we have long accepted, the cliché of the tender
heart, implying that we should probe some of our other
assumptions as well.
Hands can do something; they can take action. TCBU
includes many other references to hands, suggesting a wide
range of possibilities for their use. Hands can “peel the face
from a dead man / and hang it from the branch of a tree.” The
colonel uses his hands to spill human ears on the table and to
shake one of the ears mockingly at his guests. Hands can be
the White Glove (the name for a notorious Salvadoran death
squad). But hands can also be tender; hands can connect
people (the poet and Victoria in “As Children Together” hold
“each other’s coat sleeves”); hands can communicate (Forché
tells Victoria to write to her). Rather than provide consolation
and closure, as would a traditional elegy, “Because One Is
Always Forgotten,” like “The Colonel” and other poems
TCBU, asks readers to consider choices about their hands, their
actions, their lives.
“As Children Together”
This poem is included in the section of TCBU titled
“Reunion.” Addressed to Forché’s girlhood friend, Victoria,
this poem gives us a sense of the poet’s working-class roots.
Although Forché continues to identify strongly with the class
of her origin and with other oppressed groups, even as a
youngster she “always believed . . . that there might be a way
to get out” of Detroit. Victoria, ashamed of the “tins of surplus
flour,” the “relief checks,” and other trappings of poverty, was
also eager to escape: “I am going to have it,” Victoria asserted,
while believing that granting sexual favors to men was her
only conduit.
The first stanza represents the girls’ lives and futures as
boxed in, closed off: the snow is “pinned”; the lights are
“cubed”; they wait for Victoria’s father to “whittle his soap
cakes away, finish the whiskey,” and for Victoria’s mother to
turn off the lights. Confined by “tight black dresses”—which,
in this context, arguably represent a class marker—they
nevertheless attempt to move away from the limitations of
class, “holding each other’s coat sleeves” for support. They
slide “down the roads . . . past / crystal swamps and the death /
face of each dark house, / over the golden ice / of tobacco spit”
(my emphasis). They try to move away from their diminished
options—the “quiet of ponds,” “the blind white hills,” “a scant
snow” (my emphasis). But, sliding on ice, their movement is
literally as well as metaphorically precarious.
Like “The Colonel” and “Because One Is Always
Forgotten,” this is a documentary poem, if less apparently so.
The poet reports to Victoria and to us the poet’s memory of
their life together as children, the little she has heard about
Victoria since their childhood, and one major event in the
poet’s life since her childhood (“I have been to Paris / since we
parted”). In this stanza we hear the voice of the reporter, as we
do in the other two poems. Although the poet doesn’t know
Victoria’s current state, she reports what “They say.”
If what “they say” is true, and if Victoria reads this
poem, the poet has two simple messages for her childhood
friend: “write to me” and “I have been to Paris / since we
parted.” On first reading, many students may think that the
poet is bragging about the contrast between her own adult life
and what she believes that of Victoria to be (the poet has been
to Paris, while Victoria did not even get as far as Montreal, the
city of her childhood dreams). However, by taking the last line
in the context of the entire poem, we see the implications, not
of going to Paris, but how the poet got there: not by relying on
the men of this poem as her vehicle. “Write to me” suggests
that the poet wants to share with Victoria her experiences of—
and perhaps her strategies for—getting out.
Victoria has not escaped the cycle of poverty and
battered men. In the second-to-last stanza the poet reports a
rumor that Victoria lives in a trailer near Detroit with her
children and with her husband, who “returned from the Far
East broken / cursing holy blood at the table” and whose
whittling of soap cakes associates him with Victoria’s
whiskey-drinking father, who appears in the first stanza.
At first glance, “As Children Together” seems far
removed from Salvador’s civil war. In the context of TCBU,
however, “As Children Together” links “the Far East”
(Vietnam) to El Salvador. Young men from Forché’s workingclass neighborhood were drafted by or enlisted in the military
when many of the more privileged of their generation managed
student deferments or, after the draft lottery was established,
other alternatives to military service. In “A Lesson in
Commitment,” Forché reports that her interest in Vietnam was
fueled partly by her first husband’s fighting in Vietnam and his
suffering “from what they now call Post-Vietnam Syndrome.”
The Vietnam War, as well as her opposition to it, schooled
Forché for “another Vietnam” in El Salvador.
“As Children Together” provides a good opportunity to
discuss the range of meanings for the deliberately ambiguous
title of The Country Between Us. “Between” can mean
something that separates and distances people, but “between”
can also mean that which we share, that which connects us.
The “country” is El Salvador, but it is also the United States.
“Us” can be people on opposing sides of a civil war, people
polarized by their opinions about political issues, or people
sharing a common opposition to oppression. “Us” can be
people inhabiting two nations (Salvador and the U.S.). “Us”
can also refer to two individuals, such as the poet and Victoria,
who may be at once separated by geography and recent
experience but connected by common roots and class origin.
The poet’s saying to Victoria “write to me” suggests a desire
for “between” as separation to become the “between” of
reunion and connection.
From “The Recording Angel” and “Elegy”
(Note: Constance Coiner, who wrote this perceptive and
sensitive entry on teaching Forché’s poetry, died tragically just
before the appearance of the third edition of the Instructor’s
Guide. The following suggestions for teaching the newly
added poems by Forché are by the editor of the Instructor’s
Guide, and while they cannot match the fullness and expertise
of Constance’s work, I hope they share in its spirit.) Both the
excerpt from “The Recording Angel” and “Elegy” are from
Forché’s recent collection of poems, The Angel of History. As
the title of the collection suggests, the work is not so much
based on personal experience in the ways of poems of witness
and remembrance such as “Because One Is Always Forgotten”
and “As Children Together,” but is instead a meditation on
history, specifically, the nightmare history of the twentieth
century, from the Holocaust and Hiroshima to the tragedy of
El Salvador. In her Notes at the end of The Angel of History,
Forché says that “these utterances issue from my own
encounter with the events of this century but do not represent
‘it.’ The first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative of my earlier
years has given way to a work which has desired its own
bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with
no possibility of restoration.” These comments speak to the
potential difficulty of these later poems to students, but by
explaining some of the rationale behind the composition of
these poems, they also can help students make their own sense
of Forché’s style. Writing in response to the horror of the
Second World War in these two poems, Forché resists the
aesthetic impulse to make whole that which has been shattered
by war and genocide. Instead, the class can take Forché’s
description of this history as “polyphonic, broken” and
“haunted” as a way of reading Forché’s poems not as attempts
to obscure history but as parts of her commitment to honesty
and even realism. Rather than “explaining” the war or the
Holocaust, and thereby running the risk of substituting her
voice for the voice of the victims and those who resisted, or
even of explaining away the past, Forché instead remains true
to the ethic of witnessing by presenting us with shards from a
past “in ruins,” both in terms of descriptions and physical
places and quotations from various sources. (The Notes at the
end of The Angel of History provide some helpful references
for these quotations.) As a result, we retain as readers the
moral responsibility to confront the horror of twentieth-century
history and craft our own response, without the safety net of
received opinion or the comfort of conventional aesthetic
unity.
Issues
1. U.S. imperialism.
2. The difference between poetry that calls attention
chiefly to form, and poetry like Forché’s that is formally
interesting as well as socially and politically engaged.
3. The difference between poetry that is individualized and
self-referential and poetry like Forché’s that addresses
social and political issues and engenders human
empathy.
4. TCBU has renewed the controversy about the relation of
art to politics, about “suitable” subjects for poetry. This
peculiarly American debate assumes that only certain
poems are political, stigmatizing “political” poems and
failing to acknowledge the ideological constitution of all
literary texts. The opposition to “political” poetry, as
Forché herself has observed, extends beyond explicitly
polemical work to any “impassioned voices of witness,”
to any who leave the “safety of self-contemplation to
imagine and address the larger world” (“A Lesson in
Commitment”).
5. Forché’s poetry resonates with a sense of international
kinship. “For us to comprehend El Salvador,” Forché
has written, “for there to be moral revulsion, we must be
convinced that Salvadorans—and indeed the whole
population of Latin America—are people like ourselves,
contemporary with ourselves, and occupying the same
reality” (“Grasping the Gruesome,” Esquire, September
1983). Forché’s poetry moves us with a forceful sense of
“the other” rare in contemporary American verse.
6. The merging of personal and political.
In the twentieth century, the lyric became the preponderant
poetic form, but in TCBU Forché is a storyteller, her poetry
predominantly narrative. Because she wants her readers to
experience what she witnessed in El Salvador from 1978 to
1980, she consciously resists lyricizing experiences. Forché
has said that “the twentieth-century human condition demands
a poetry of witness” (“El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire”).
To show how Forché departs from the lyric, teachers
should define the lyric and provide well-known examples. To
show how Forché departs from the elegy in “Because One Is
Always Forgotten,” teachers should define the elegy and
provide known examples. For “The Colonel” teachers should
define and provide other examples of “metonymy.”
Original Audience
The particular audience for Forché’s poetry is the American
people. Monsignor Romero (again, the Archbishop of San
Salvador who was assassinated by a right-wing death squad
while praying at mass) urged Forché to return to the U.S. and
“tell the American people what is happening” (“El Salvador:
An Aide Mémoire”). Poets do not often so purposefully
address such a wide audience.
Students should discuss whether—and, if so, in what
ways—Forché’s poems effectively address the wide popular
audience she seeks, one that would include more people than
the “already converted.” Do the three poems under
consideration avoid or fall into off-putting didacticism?
Students, of course, will have their own responses, but I would
argue that Forché has consciously adopted strategies
throughout TCBU that invite the reader into the poems. One of
those strategies is to acknowledge her own ignorance rather
than point to the reader’s; another is to place herself or
someone else in the poem as an object of ridicule or
admonition rather than the reader. For example, the colonel
sneers at the poet; the poet does not upbraid her reader. And in
“Because One Is Always Forgotten,” a hungry campesino
would reject Viera’s heart, admonishing: “you can’t eat heart.”
Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Pablo
Neruda—these are anti-imperialist, politically engaged writers
whose lives and literary texts promote a global as well as a
private kinship.
The private anguish of Sylvia Plath’s, Anne Sexton’s,
and Robert Lowell’s confessional poetry provides a
provocative contrast to the public issues of human rights
violations, U.S. foreign policy, war, and class oppression
addressed in “The Colonel,” “Because One Is Always
Forgotten,” and “As Children Together.”
“The Colonel”:
1. How does the capitalization of the first four words
function in the poem?
2. Can anyone identify the traditional poetic forms that
Forché sparingly employs as “aesthetic centerpieces” in
this “artless,” “journalistic,” documentary poem? (I’m
thinking here of “the moon swung bare on its black cord
over the house” and the simile describing the ears as
“dried peach halves”).
3. Why is the television “cop show” in English, the
commercial in Spanish?
4. Why the proliferation of to-be verbs (is, was, were)?
5. What are the women in this poem doing?
6. What might the colonel have in mind when he says,
“Something for your poetry, no?”
7. What are the implied and explicit cultural and political
relationships between Salvador and the U.S.?
“Because One Is Always Forgotten”:
1. In the first line, what does “it” refer to?
2. What are the relationships between “heart” and other
body parts?
3. Who is “you” in the third stanza?
4. Identify similarities/differences (including formal ones)
between this poem and “The Colonel.”
5. This poem concludes the section TCBU titled “In
Salvador, 1978–80.” Why might have Forché chosen
“hands” as the last word of this section?
“As Children Together”:
1. What are some of the similarities/differences between
Victoria and the poet as children? What might be some
similarities/differences between them as adults?
2. What is the significance of “Paris” in the last line?
3. What are some of the difficulties of remaining in touch
with one’s community, cultural group, or class of origin
after being separated from them by emigration, formal
education, or class mobility?
4. What’s the difference between the poet’s saying, “I
always believed this,/Victoria, that there might / be a
way to get out” and Victoria’s asserting, “I am going to
have it”?
5. Identify similarities/differences (including formal ones)
between this poem and “The Colonel” and “Because
One Is Always Forgotten.”
“The Recording Angel”:
1. How does Forché’s description of these poems as
“polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no
possibility of restoration” affect our understanding of
their structure?
2. What is the effect of the juxtaposition of images of both
peace and terror, such as the wings of doves with “a
comic wedding in which corpses exchange vows”? What
other such contrasts can be found, and what is their
effect?
3. In Section I, the city seems deserted in the aftermath of
some great calamity. Which images do you seize on to
make sense of what has happened?
4. As we move into sections II and III, we encounter a
child (referred to only as “it”) and a woman in a
photograph. What clues (such as the ominous image of
“the fresh claw of a swastika on Rue Boulard”) does the
poem provide as to who these people are (or even if they
are the same person) and what happened to them?
“Elegy”:
1. The quoted material in the poem is from descriptions of
concentration camps in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film
about the Holocaust, Shoah. What is the affect of such
prosaic, almost matter-of-fact descriptions of the
brutality of the Holocaust?
2. “And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking”
can suggest the difficulty, almost impossibility, of
finding adequate expression for the horror of the
Holocaust. How would you describe the strategy that
“Elegy” uses and its effectiveness?
3. Who is the ghost figure in the poem? What kind of
witness does he provide?
4. Notice the simultaneously beautiful and ominous image
of the “tattoo of stars,” both suggesting the delicacy of
the night sky but also reminding us of the ID numbers
tattooed on the arms of concentration camp inmates.
How does such imagery work as part of the “bit of
speaking” against the silence of the aftermath of the
Holocaust? What other examples of such imagery can
you find?
Approaches to Writing
Students in my undergraduate courses write one-page (doublespaced, typed) “response” essays to each assigned text, which
they turn in before I have said anything about the writer of
text(s). In these essays, students reflect on why they have
responded to the text(s) as they have, including some
identification of their own subject position (gender, race,
national origin, class origin, political views, and so on), but
they must also refer specifically to the text. In the case of these
five poems, students could choose to focus the response essay
on just one poem or they could write about a recurring theme,
image, and strategy, briefly citing all five poems.
A few students have elected to write creative responses,
trying their hand at imitating the form of one of the assigned
poems.
Bibliography
Forché, Carolyn. “El Salvador: An Aide Mémoire.” American
Poetry
Review (July/August 1981): 3–7.
———. “A Lesson in Commitment.” TriQuarterly (Winter
1986): 30–38.
Greer, Michael. “Politicizing the Modern: Carolyn Forché in
El Salvador
and America.” The Centennial Review
(Spring 1986): 160–80.
Kufeld, Adam. El Salvador: Photographs by Adam Kufeld.
“Introduction
by Arnoldo Ramos and poetry by
Manlio Argueta.
Mann, John. “Carolyn Forché: Poetry and Survival.” American
Poetry 3.3
(Spring 1986): 51–69.
Mattison, Harry et al., eds. El Salvador: Work of Thirty
Photographers.
Text by Carolyn Forché. New York:
Writers and Readers Publishing
Cooperative, 1983.
Useful interviews include David Montenegro’s in American
Poetry Review 17.6 (November/December 1988): 35–40;
Constance Coiner’s in The Jacaranda Review (Winter 1988):
47–68; and Kim Addonizio and John High’s in Five Fingers
Review 3 (1985): 116–31.
Tomás Rivera (1935–1984)
Contributing Editor: Ramón Saldívar
Rivera’s novel is written in nonsequential chronology, with a
multiplicity of characters, without an easily identifiable
continuous narrator, and without a strictly casual narrative
logic. While each of the selections is coherent within itself,
students will need to be prepared for the apparent lack of
continuity from one section of work to the next.
I begin with a careful discussion of the first selection,
“The Lost Year,” to show that there is, at least in sketchy form,
the beginnings of a narrative identity present. As in other
modernist and postmodernist writings, in William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying and Go Down, Moses, for example, or in Juan
Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the narrative is not expository,
attempting to give us historical depiction. It offers instead
complex subjective impressions and psychological portraiture.
Students should be asked to read the first selection looking for
ways in which the narrative does cohere. Ask: Who speaks?
Where is the speaker? What does the speaker learn about himCopyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
or herself here, even if only minimally? As students proceed to
the following selections, it is appropriate to ask what this
unconventional narrative form has to do with the themes of the
work.
Rivera’s work is openly critical of and in opposition to
mainstream American culture. What does it accomplish by
being oppositional? What does it share with other “marginal”
literatures, such as African-American, feminist, gay and
lesbian, or third world writings? Instead of attempting to locate
Rivera within American or modernist writings, it might be
useful to think of Rivera’s place within the group of other
noncanonic, antitraditional, engaged writings.
Students are sometimes misled by the apparent
simplicity of the first selection: They might need to be
carefully alerted to the question of identity being posed there.
Also, the historical context of racial violence and political
struggle may need to be constructed for students: They may
want to see these stories as exclusively about the plight of
individuals when in reality Rivera is using individual
characters as types for a whole community
Issues
General Themes: The coming to maturity of a young child as
he begins to get a glimmer of the profound mystery of the
adult world. The child, apparently a boy, raises in the second
selection the traditional lehresjahre themes, having to do with
the disillusionment of childhood dreams.
Specific Themes: This coming to maturity and the
posing of universal existential questions (Who am I? Where do
I belong?) take place within the specific historical and social
context of the working-class life and political struggle of the
Mexican-American migrant farmworker of the late 1940s and
1950s in Texas.
Universal themes are thus localized to a very high
degree. What does this localizing of universal themes
accomplish in the novel? Also, the question of personal
identity is in each of the three selections increasingly tied to
the identity of the community (la raza). The stories thus also
thematize the relationship between private history and public
history.
Questions of style are intimately involved with questions of
substance in these selections. Rivera claims to have been
influenced by his reading in James Joyce, Marcel Proust,
William Faulkner, and the great Latin American novelists.
Rivera also acknowledged that he had been profoundly
influenced by the work of the great Mexican-American
anthropologist and folklorist Américo Paredes, whose
ethnographic work realistically pictured turn-of-the-century
life in the Southwest. Why does this work about the “local”
theme of life in the American Southwest offer itself in the
form of high modernism? Would not a more straightforward
social realism have been more appropriate for the themes it
presents?
Original Audience
The work was originally written in Spanish, using the
colloquial, everyday cadences of working-class Spanishspeaking people. Bilingual instructors should review the
original text and try to point out to students that the English
translations are but approximations of a decidedly oral rhythm.
Written at the height of the Chicano political movement and in
the midst of an often bitter labor struggle, at times Rivera’s
work bristles with anger and outrage. The turmoil of the late
1960s and early 1970s plays a large role in the tone of the
work.
Rivera claimed to have been influenced by many modern
authors, Faulkner chief among them. A useful discussion of
the relationships between form and theme might arise by
comparing Rivera’s work with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or
Absalom, Absalom! What does narrative experimentation have
to do with social realism? Why does an author choose
nontraditional narrative techniques? What does one gain by
setting aside casually motivated character action?
1. Many of the questions posed by this study guide might
be fruitfully addressed to students before they read
Rivera’s work. Especially useful are those questions that
ask students to think about the relationship between
form/content and that take into account the
historical/political circumstances of the period during
which these stories were written.
2. Students might consider in the piece entitled “And the
Earth Did Not Devour Him”: Why does the earth not
devour him? What does the narrator learn and why does
this knowledge seem so momentous? Concerning the
last selection, “When We Arrive,” students might
discuss the journey motif: Where are these migrant
workers going? What will they find at the end of the
road?
Bibliography
Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 74–90, includes a discussion of
the selections. International Studies in Honor of Tomás
Rivera, edited by Julian Olivares (Houston: Arte Público
Press, 1985) is an excellent collection of essays on And the
Earth Did Not Devour Him.
Nicholasa Mohr (b. 1938)
Mohr’s writings are quite accessible for the college-age
student population. There is no bilingualism, her English is
quite simple and direct, and her stories in general do not create
difficulties in reading or comprehension.
Issues
1. The universal theme of “growing up” (bildungsroman),
and in her case in particular, growing up female in El
Barrio.
2. The theme of the family; views of the Hispanic family
and the expectations it holds of its members, in contrast
to its Anglo-American counterpart.
3. Sexual roles in Latino culture; traditional versus free
vocations (for men).
4. Mother/daughter relationships; tensions, generational
differences.
5. Women’s issues such as career versus family, the
economic survival of welfare mothers, dependency and
independence issues.
6. Outside views of the barrio “ghetto” in relation to the
voices of those who have lived in the inner cities.
The autobiographical form is quite predominant in Mohr’s
writings, as is James Clifford’s concept of “ethnobiography,”
in which the self is seen in conjunction with his or her ethnic
community. And Mohr employs traditional storytelling,
simple, direct, accessible, chronological use of time, and a
logical structure.
Very dynamic discussions emerge when students are
asked to evaluate Mohr’s transparent, realist style as good
literature or not. This discussion should include observations
of how many U.S. Latino and Latina writers have opted for a
less academic and so-called “sophisticated” style that would
allow for wider audiences outside the academic world.
Original Audience
It is important to read many of Mohr’s works as literature for
young adolescents. This explains and justifies the simplicity
and directness of her style.
Fruitful comparisons could be made if we look at other Latina
women who also write on “growing up female and Hispanic in
the United States”: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango
Street (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1983); Cuentos by
Latinas, eds. Alma Gómez, Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana
Romo-Carmona (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color
Press, 1983); and Helena Maria Viramontes’s The Moths and
Other Stories (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985).
Viramontes’s stories promise fruitful comparisons with
Mohr’s Ritual of Survival.
In addition, Mohr has been contrasted to Piri Thomas’s
Down These Mean Streets, another autobiographical book in
which El Barrio is presented in terms of drugs, gangs, and
violence. I would propose a comparison to Eduard Rivera’s
Family Installments as yet another example of ethnobiography.
Finally, interesting contrasts and parallelisms may be
drawn from looking at North American women writers such as
Ann Beattie and the Canadian Margaret Atwood; while class
and race perspectives might differ, female and feminist issues
could be explored as common themes.
1. Study questions; Specific questions on text, characters,
plot, endings, issued raised. More major themes could
also be explored such as: How do we define epic
characters, history, and great literature? Where would
Mohr’s characters fit within the traditional paradigms?
2. Writing assignment: Students may write their own
autobiography; experiment with first- and third-person
narratives; contrast female students’ writings with male
students’.
Paper topics: (a) Discuss the role of women within
family and society in Mohr’s stories; (b) discuss Mohr
as a feminine or feminist writer; (c) analyze the Hispanic
cultural background to her stories vis-à-vis the universal
themes.
Bibliography
Not much has been written on Nicholasa Mohr’s work per se.
The following are good introductory articles, and the Rivero
article is particularly good for the study of bildungsroman in
Latina women’s writings:
Acosta-Belén, Edna. “The Literature of Puerto Rican National
Minority in
the United States.” The Bilingual Review
5:1–2 (Jan.–Aug. 1978):
107–16.
in Nuyorican
Literature.” ADE Journal (December 1988).
Mohr, Nicholasa. “On Being Authentic.” The Americas
Review 14:3–4
(Fall-Winter 1986): 106–09.
———. “Puerto Rican Writers in the United States, Puerto
Rican Writers in
Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond
Language.” The Americas Review
15:2
(Summer 1987): 87–92.
Rivero, Eliana. “The House on Mango Street: Tales of
Growing Up Female
and Hispanic.” Tucson:
Southwest Institute for Research on Women,
The
University of Arizona, Working Paper 22, 1986.
Pat Mora (b. 1942)
Contributing Editor: Juan Bruce-Novoa
The ethnic background of the students will greatly determine
the nature of class discussion. How sympathetic they are to
Mora’s position will vary. Students may be first generation
immigrants who themselves are adapting to English and U.S.
culture, or second- or third-generation residents whose
relatives are the living reminders of the process. Others may
see it as an experience their ancestors went through years ago,
while some will never have asked themselves if their ancestors
ever spoke anything but English. You may find yourself in the
middle of a heated discussion of English as the official
national language or the threat to American culture that the use
of other languages represents for many people. I prefer to
guide the discussion toward the universal quality of the
experience of acculturation the poems express.
Issues
The Mora selections feature the theme of English language
acquisition as a painful experience of conflict and suffering for
native Spanish speakers. In each poem, school is at least
partially the setting for the conflict. Her perspective
characterizes the experience as one of gain and loss,
emphasizing the latter as the loss of cultural authenticity, while
the value of the gain is left in doubt. This position is common
among proponents of bilingual education and ethnic pluralism,
and can be found among the majority of writers from the
Chicano communities. It reflects a turn away from the
historical paradigm of U.S. culture as English-based that in
turn made the learning of English a necessary rite of passage.
However, it should be noted that each poem includes a touch
of ambivalence: The characters are attracted to English-based
culture, producing a desire whose satisfaction they seek.
Mora’s form and style are direct and should present few
problems for students. The most notable feature is the use of
Spanish words, but she does so on the most basic level that
requires only dictionary translating for understanding. One
should note, however, that the girl’s name, “Esperanza,” in
“Border Town,” means hope—an obvious pun.
Original Audience
Mora tends to publish in small presses specializing in
distribution to a Latino readership. Hence, her poetry can
count on a mostly sympathetic audience, one that probably
will not find the smattering of Spanish hinders comprehension.
Mora can be placed in the context of Bernice Zamora and
Lorna Dee Cervantes, among Chicana writers included here, as
well as Judith Ortiz Cofer. For a similar depiction of the
situation faced by Chicanos in Texas schools, see Tomás
Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Part; for the ambivalent
attitude of desire and fear, see Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of
Memory; for a contrasting view on the question of English
language acquisition, see Linda Chavez’s Out of the Barrio.
1. Students can be asked to locate the verses in each poem
in which the dilemma of attraction and repulsion are
conveyed. Ask them to consider the pros and cons of
acculturation, especially as it relates to education.
2. Have students write about their own experience and,
specifically, about whether education has demanded of
them anything similar to what Mora describes. They
could consider the question of private versus public
codes of discourse and if education can serve both.
Víctor Hernández Cruz (b. 1949)
Cruz’s poetry may seem hermetic at times, and partly this is
due to the use of imagery, words, and references that originate
in Hispanic culture or mythology. Also, his poetry demands a
reader who is familiar with both English and Spanish since he
frequently plays with both languages.
I would advise students to read carefully and aid them
by preparing a glossary or handout that would clarify the
difficult references. (The problem is that not all English
teachers have access to the meaning of local references to
Puerto Rican towns, Indian gods, mythological figures.)
I would emphasize the importance of the concrete poetry
movement in relation to Cruz’s work. The importance of the
collage text, the use of space, the page, the graphics, and the
significance of play as integral elements in the reading of a
poem, could be clearly explained by a visual presentation of
concrete poems from Brazil, Europe, and the United States.
Issues
Urban life; meaning of language as an identity construct;
importance of the cultural and historical past and how it flows
into the present; importance of music and drugs as a basis for
the poet’s images; Hispanic culture and identity: How is it
reaffirmed through literary creation?
Focus on the importance of collage or hybrid texts; influence
of concrete poetry; linguistic mixtures and lucid bilingualism;
concept of metaliterary texts; contemporary American poetry:
free verse, fragmentation, minimalism, surrealism.
Compare and contrast with Allen Ginsberg and other poets of
the beat generation (use of imagery based on drugs, music of
the ’60s, influence of surrealism and irreverent language); an
additional comparison to e. e. cummings, as well as to the
concrete poets, would be helpful in terms of use of space,
punctuation, and the page as signifiers. Contrast with poets
like Pedro Pietri and Tato Laviera, in which the elements of
popular culture are central to the understanding of their works
(Cruz is much more introspective and abstract, and does not fit
totally into the paradigm of Nuyorican aesthetics).
Study questions will focus mostly on the assigned text and
would require students to identify major theme, use of
language and imagery, and aesthetic effect of each poem.
Paper topics would focus on major themes. For example:
1. Discuss how “Speech changing within space,” the
epigraph to By Lingual Wholes, encapsulates Víctor
Hernández Cruz’s poetics.
2. Would you agree that English is transformed or affected
by Spanish in Cruz’s works? If so, how is this achieved?
3. Discuss the presence of Hispanic culture within
contemporary, urban life in the United States as it is
reflected in Cruz’s literature; that is, how he tropicalizes
the U.S. cultural identity.
4. Analyze Cruz’s texts as an example of urban literature:
How do his point of view, attitudes, imagery, and
rhythms create a sense of life in American cities?
5. Write on Cruz’s use of music and drugs as basis for his
poetic imagery.
Bibliography
Acosta-Belén, Edna. “The Literature of the Puerto Rican
National Minority
in the United States.”
Bilingual Review, Vol. 5, no. 1 and 2. Jan.-Aug.
1978:
107–16.
Aparicio, Frances. “Salsa, Maracas and Baile: Latin Popular
Music in the
Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz.” MELUS
16:1 (Spring 1989–1990):
43–58.
in Nuyorican
Literature.” ADE Bulletin. MLA, Dec. 1988: 45–51.
Cruz, Víctor Hernández . “Mountains in the North: Hispanic
Writing in the
USA.” The Americas Review, 14: 3–4
Fall/Winter 1986: 110–14.
Garrett Kaoru Hongo (b. 1951)
Contributing Editors: Amy Ling and King-Kok Cheung
Explain that Hongo’s themes and craft are evident even in the
small selection we have in this text. The title poem of his first
book, Yellow Light, emphasizes the centrality of the Asian
perspective by ascribing a positive, fertile quality to the color
commonly designating Asian skin and formerly meaning
“cowardly.” By focusing his sights on ordinary people in the
midst of their daily rounds, as in “Yellow Light,” “Off from
Swing Shift,” and “And Your Soul Shall Dance,” by
describing their surroundings in precise detail, by suggesting
their dreams, Hongo depicts both the specificities of the
Japanese-American experience and its universality. “And Your
Soul Shall Dance” is a tribute to playwright and fiction writer
Wakako Yamauchi.
Issues
The work of any Asian-American writer is best understood in
the context of the black civil rights and the women’s liberation
movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These movements by
African Americans and women led Asian Americans to join in
the push for change. Asian Americans as a group had endured
racial discrimination in the U.S. for over a century, from the
harassment of Chinese in the California gold mines to the
internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World
War II. Furthermore, the last three wars the United States has
engaged in have been fought in Asia, a fact that further
consolidated a sense of community among the hitherto
disparate Asian groups in this country.
In Hongo’s volume Yellow Light, we no longer find a
dependence on language and rhythm borrowed from AfricanAmerican culture nor strident screams of bitterness and anger
characteristic of polemic Asian-American poetry, the dominant
mode and tone of the 1970s. Hongo is at home in his skin,
positive about his background and the people around him,
confident in his own voice, concerned as much with his craft
as with his message.
Hongo’s poems paint portraits of the people around him,
and he invests his people with dignity and bathes them in love.
Pride in an Asian-American heritage shines through in the
catalog of foods in “Who Among You Knows the Essence of
Garlic?” Hongo’s eye has the precision of seventeenth-century
Flemish still-life painters, but his art is dynamic and evokes
the sounds, smells, and tastes of the foods he describes.
He has combined the consciousness of the late
twentieth-century ethnic nationalist with the early twentiethcentury imagist’s concern for the most precise, the most
resonant image, and added to this combination his own
largeness of spirit.
The examples of Lawson Inada and Frank Chin excited Garrett
Hongo, who was encouraged by their work to do his own.
Frank Chin displayed his artistic and verbal talent,
making his claim for a place in American history and
expressing his deep ambivalence about Chinese Americans in
his plays. “Chickencoop Chinaman” was a dazzling display of
verbal pyrotechnics but underlying the surface razzle-dazzle is
a passionate throbbing of anger and pain for the emasculation
of Chinese men in the United States.
Lawson Fusao Inada was another visible and vocal
model for younger Asian-American writers. His book of
poetry Before the War provided a range of models and styles
from lyrical musings, to sublimated anger from a JapaneseAmerican perspective, to colloquial outbursts inspired by
black jazz and rhythms.
Hongo acknowledges other models and mentors as well:
Bert Meyers, Donald Hall, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright,
and Philip Levine.
Bibliography
Filipelli, Laurie. Garrett Hongo. Boise, ID: Boise State
University, 1997.
Jarman, Mark. “The Volanco Inside.” Southern Review 32.2
(1996):
337–43.
Kodama-Nishimoto, Michi, and Warren Nishimoto. “Interview
with Writer
Garrett Hongo: Oral History and Literature.”
Oral History Recorder
(1986): 2–4.
Michael S. Harper (b. 1938)
Contributing Editor: Herman Beavers
Harper’s poems often prove difficult because he is so deft at
merging personal and national history within the space of one
metaphor. One must be aware, then, of Harper’s propensity
toward veiled references to historical events. One can think
here of a series of poems like “History as Apple Tree.” The
result, in a series like this, is that the reader cannot follow the
large number of historical references Harper makes—in this
case, to the history of Rhode Island and its founder, Roger
Williams. The poems can be seen as obscure or enigmatic,
when, in fact, they are designed to highlight a mode of
African-American performance. In the same manner that one
finds jazz musicians “quoting” another song within the space
of a solo, Harper’s use of history is often designed to suggest
the simultaneity of events, the fact that one cannot escape the
presence of the past.
Harper’s interviews are often helpful, particularly those
interviews where he discusses his poetic technique. Harper is a
storyteller, a performer. He is adept at the conveyance of
nuance in the poems. A valuable strategy is teaching Harper’s
poems in conjunction with a brief introduction to modern jazz.
Team teaching with a jazz historian or an ethnomusicologist
while focusing on Harper’s strategies of composition is a way
to ground the student in Harper’s use of jazz as a structuring
technique in his poems. Moreover, it allows for dialogue
between literary and musical worlds. Since Harper’s poems are
often about both music and the context out of which the music
springs, such a dialogue is important for students to see. As far
as history is concerned, pointing the student toward, for
example, a history of the Civil War or a biography of John
Brown will often illuminate Harper’s propensity to “name
drop” in his poems. What becomes clear is that Harper is not
being dense, but rather he sees his poetic project as one of
“putting the reader to work.”
You might introduce Harper by showing the film Birth
of a Nation in order to flesh out Harper’s revisionary stance
toward myth. Using the film as a kind of countermilieu, one
can point out that Harper’s poetry is designed to create a
renewed, more vital American mythos. Also, listening to John
Coltrane’s A Love Supreme album will prove invaluable to
understanding Harper’s jazz poems.
Students often protest the inaccessibility of the poems:
for example, “I don’t understand this poem at all!” There are
often questions regarding Harper’s use of the word “modality.”
Also they do not understand Harper’s use of repetition, which
is designed to evoke the chant, or the poem as song.
Issues
Harper is very concerned in his poems with the “American
tradition of forgetfulness.” In his poetry, one finds him
creating situations where the contradictions between oral and
written versions of history are brought into focus. Because
Harper thinks of poetry as a discourse of song, the poems
utilize improvisation to convey their themes. The intent of this
is to highlight the complexity of American identity.
Harper’s personal issues are, further, not necessarily
distinguishable from the historical in his poems. If one were to
point to a set of events that spur Harper’s poetic voice, it
would be the deaths of two of his children shortly after birth.
Harper’s poems on the subject express not only the personal
grief of his wife and himself, but also the loss of cultural
possibility the children represent. As a black man in a country
so hostile to those who are black, Harper’s grief is conflated
into rage at the waste of human potential, a result of American
forms of amnesia.
In short, the historical and the personal often function in
layered fashion. Thus, Harper may use his personal grief as the
springboard for illuminating a history of atrocities; the source
of grief is different, but the grief is no less real.
While Harper does not write in “forms” (at least of the
classical sort), his work is informed by jazz composition and
also several examples of African-American modernism.
Clearly, Sterling Brown, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Hayden
have each had an impact on Harper’s poetry, not only
formally, but also in terms of the questions Harper takes up in
his poems. I would also cite W. H. Auden and W. B. Yeats as
influences.
Formally and stylistically, Harper’s poetry derives from
jazz improvisation. For example, in one of his poems on the
jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, Harper works out a poem that
doubles as a prayer-chant in Coltrane’s memory. What this
suggests is that Harper does not favor symmetricality for the
mere sake of symmetricality; thus, he eschews forms like the
sonnet or the villanelle. One does find Harper, however, using
prosody to usher the reader into a rhythmic mode that captures
the nature of poetry as song as opposed to written discourse.
Original Audience
Harper’s poems have indeed been widely read. However, his
work has undergone a shift in audience. When he came on the
scene in the late sixties, the black arts movement produced a
large amount of poetry, largely because of poetry’s supposed
immediacy of impact. For that reason, I believe Harper’s work
was read by a number of people who expected militancy,
anger, and a very narrow subject matter. However, one can see
that his work has a different stylistic quality than that of many
of his contemporaries who claimed to be writing for a
narrower audience. Harper’s poetry is more oriented toward
inclusiveness; thus his poems utilize American history as a
poetic site rather than just relying on a reified notion of racial
identity that is crystallized into myth. Thus, after the sixties,
Harper’s audience became more clearly located in the poetry
establishment. Though he still writes about musicians and
artists, his readership is more specialized, more focused on
poetry than twenty years ago.
Compare Harper with Brown, Ellison, Auden, and Yeats, as
well as James Wright, Philip Levine, and Seamus Heaney.
Hayden, Wright, and Yeats can, in their respective fashions, be
considered remembrancers. That is, their work (to paraphrase
Yeats) suggests that “memories are old identities.” Hence, they
often explore the vagaries of the past. A fruitful comparison
might, for example, be made between Harper’s and Hayden’s
poems on Vietnam. Brown and Harper are both interested in
acts of heroism in African-American culture and lore. Ellison
and Harper share an inclusive vision of America that eschews
racial separatism in favor of a more dualistic sense of
American identity.
The letter-essay is extremely effective. Here the student writes
a letter to Harper, a figure who appears in one of his poems,
the instructor in the class, a classmate, etc., and engages the
poems through his or her own personal response to the poems.
The exercise allows students to feel more comfortable posing
questions as part of their inquiry and also provides an
opportunity to reflect on the poem’s impact on their lives both
experientially and exegetically.
Bibliography
See the interview with Harper in John O’Brien’s Interviews
with Black Writers. Also see his interview in Ploughshares,
Fall 1981.
Read Robert B. Stepto’s essay on Harper’s work in the
anthology Chant of Saints (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1979) and his essay on Harper’s poems in The Hollins
Critic (1976).
Michael G. Cooke has a chapter on Harper in his book
Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
The most recent retrospective on Harper’s work can be
found in Callaloo 13, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 780–800.
Postmodernity and Difference:
Promises and Threats
John Barth (b. 1930)
Contributing Editor: Julius Rowan Raper
To call an author “a writers’ writer” is often the kiss of death.
Yet Barth in “Lost in the Funhouse” and in other works goes
out of his way to draw to himself this label that sets him apart
from more popular “men’s writers” (or “businessmen’s
writers”) like Ernest Hemingway or “women’s writers” like
Willa Cather. By foregrounding the writerly nature of his
work, Barth, perhaps more than any American author before
him, prevents his readers from ignoring the style and form of
his work while they pursue the content. Rather than focus on
the relatively accessible content about Ambrose, Peter, Magda,
and the three adults, as a teacher I want students to speculate
about Barth’s reasons for so intrusively and self-consciously
focusing on the writing process.
Issues
At least three large explanations for the self-consciousness of
Barth’s works come to mind. In Chimera he will have the
Genie report that in the U.S. in our time “the only readers of
artful fiction [are] critics, other writers, and unwilling students
who, left to themselves, [prefer] music and pictures to words.”
In short, a serious writer has to recognize that his only willing
readers are other writers; that he or she is, in fact, a writers’
writer.
A second explanation is that, for postmodern writers,
especially for Barth, the traditional modes of fiction have been
used up—in Barth’s favorite term, exhausted. This is
especially true of the bildungsroman, the story of the
development of an individual, and even more so if that
individual happens to be an artist. In our century, James Joyce
had his Stephen Dedalus, D. H. Lawrence his Paul Morel,
Sherwood Anderson his George Willard, Thomas Wolfe his
Eugene Gant, Ernest Hemingway his Nick Adams, William
Faulkner his Quentin Compson, and so on. “ ‘Is anything more
tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive
adolescents?’ ” Indeed! Even this self-negating idea has to
appear in quotation marks because it has been uttered before.
Rather than ignore this remark, which could easily alienate
already unwilling students (one of the three groups remaining
among readers of artful fictions), I would note the curious
detail that Barth has his own seemingly autobiographical
portrait of an artist in the character named Ambrose Mensch
(meaning roughly “Immortal Man”), who appears here and in
other stories of the collection and figures as well as a major
figure in the later megafiction, LETTERS: a Novel. Why would
Barth devote such energy to an apparently exhausted fictional
form? He obviously believes that problems of adolescents are
important and that such stories can be told in a new way that
“replenishes” (another key term for Barth) an entire mode of
fiction. That new way must include “metafiction,” an important postmodern device that allows novelists to write the
criticism of their own fiction while creating the fiction itself.
The reasons metafiction has become important in our time are
another large topic that could lead the class to fruitful
discussions.
These could include the fact that at the critical moment
in the fiction, both the boy and the writer, out of whom the
reader may wish to construct a single subject, realize that the
self-reflexiveness that plagues each of them “makes perfect
observation impossible,” a Sortrean truth vital to many
contemporary postrealist fictions.
A third explanation for the self-consciousness here is at
once more personal and more cultural. The narrator of
Ambrose’s story is a writer trapped inside his story, unable to
come to its end. He is a blocked writer. In a number of works,
Barth fictionalizes the writer’s block he apparently suffered
after the two gigantic novels of the early 1960s. Selfconsciousness and writer’s block may belong to a single
vicious circle; each may lead to the other. Barth takes writer’s
block as his theme so often that one suspects it represents more
than a personal event—no matter how engrossing such
“autobiographic” episodes may be to readers primarily
interested in “real life.” At this other level, writer’s block
appears to be Barth’s metaphor for Western Civilization at
present. In the recurring conflicts between women and men,
East and West, Marxists and capitalists, liberals and
conservatives, and blacks and whites, our culture finds itself so
lacking in true invention that it can do little except, like the
fated characters in Chimera, repeat a pattern passed down
through centuries, the swing of the pendulum between
extremes. If the blocked writer belongs to the Waste Land,
Eliot’s metaphor that haunted the twentieth century, the writer
Barth imagines into being would feel more at home in the
Funhouse (as opposed to the funny farm), where values and
options would be far different. At the same time, the blocked
writer provides an appropriate motive for producing the
metafictional passages with which Barth frames his fictions,
the seeming digressions that allow him to create an audience
for his generally nonrealistic stories.
In giving up the conventional mimesis of realism, Barth,
however, elects the contrary powers of what, in Chimera, he
terms the Principle of Metaphoric Means, “the investiture by
the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction
as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value”
(Chimera 203). This device leads to an additional motive for
Barth’s frequent dramatizations of the blocked writer. Such
writers, as noted above, may be metaphors for something
important in our culture. Students in class discussion may want
to explore possible referents for the metaphor by asking
themselves what aspects of American or Western culture
appeared especially “blocked” in 1968, a year that, it turns out,
may stand roughly as the midpoint of the Cold War. What is
there about contemporary culture that it has lost its ability to
move forward in the progressive fashion that the
Enlightenment, Positivism, and modern scientific thinking
once promised?
Students may then move to the possibility that every
individual is a potential writer, that each of us lives out a script
that someone else will write for us if we do not write it
ourselves, that many women and men seem caught, like the
narrator of this story, in scripts they do not want and whose
end they cannot find. The next step would be to explore the
degree to which the devices Barth employs, including
metafiction, parody, Metaphoric Means, and (elsewhere) myth
and fantasy, could be used to frame the stories of blocked
lives, to liberate one from such narratives, and to write more
promising life scripts. In short, can Barth’s postmodern
approach free up blocked lives or replenish a stymied, possibly
exhausted culture? If not, might the attempt to do so still
comprise a tragic gesture with a touch of the heroic in it?
Students could then weight the elements of parody, satire, and
muted tragedy in Barth’s story.
Consideration of Metaphoric Means as a global device
leads to a careful reconsideration of every aspect of the story,
including seeming authorial mistakes. If in the postexistential
world we are all writers, then not only must we watch how we
dot our i’s and cross our t’s, but how we drop our apostrophes.
For example, the narrator mentions “Peter and Ambrose’s
father” but speaks of “Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother.” Is this a
simple slip, or a telling one? Students may want to pay special
attention to parallel usages in the story or explore the later
adventures of Ambrose, Peter, Magda, their parents, and/or
Uncle Carl in LETTERS.
Original Audience
It may appear that Barth’s audience is made up of other
writers, critics, and writing teachers. If we are, however, to
write our way out of the (doomed?) scripts we inherited from
our culture, then every thinking person may have something to
learn from Barth. The risks Barth takes indicate he arrived on
the literary scene when the success of T. S. Eliot and James
Joyce in having critics prepare an audience for their difficult
texts inspired him to trust that time would provide readers for
his works. By 1968, however, like other metafictionists to
come, he was covering himself by providing guidelines,
sometimes ironic ones, for critics still working within the
modernist aesthetic.
The most useful comparisons for Barth are to the international
fictionists whom he cites as inspirations: Jorge Luis Borges,
Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino; and to the experimental
writers who are his fellow postmodernists: Robert Coover,
Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Federman, Cynthia Ozick, John
Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles,
Ishmael Reed, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, John
Wideman, and others. The most obvious contrasts are to
traditional flat realists like Cather and Hemingway, naturalists
like Theodore Dreiser, engaged novelists like John Dos Passos
and John Steinbeck, and representative modernists like
Faulkner and Joyce, especially as the latter two use the mythic
method that Barth in Chimera and elsewhere stands on its
head. Less obvious contrasts would be to the three
contemporary trends that retreat from the more audacious
experiments of the postmodernists: the minimalists like
Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Ann Beattie; other
contemporary southern authors such as Walker Peroy, William
Styron, Reynolds Price, and Lee Smith; and the Magical
Realists, who make minimal use of the fantasy devices that
Barth, like Coover, Fowles, Durrell, and Pynchon, employs
with such relish. Another sort of contrast can be made—in an
age that commodifies not only space and time but also gender,
class, and race—to Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Alice
Walker, James Baldwin, E. L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg,
among others. While for many of his contemporaries the
message has become the merchandise, Barth persists in
focusing on the challenges and powers of the fictional medium
itself.
1. “Lost in the Funhouse” cries out for student papers of
two types. First, one might want students to try a readerresponse approach, to let them work out their anger
against intrusive metafictional commentary, to identify
the causes of their anger, and perhaps discover reasons
for Barth’s choosing this device. Next, students could
employ a traditional close-reading approach to take up
the following questions:
2. What are the indications in the story that Barth has
taught creative writing courses? Is this story good
pedagogy, or a parody thereof ?
3. Why doesn’t the narrator complete many of his
sentences? How does this fit with Barth’s interest in the
literature of exhaustion? How does Barth attempt here to
replenish the exhausted story of sensitive adolescents?
4. What is the temporal setting of the paragraph in which
the narrator says, “I’ll never be an author”? What is the
author’s problem here and how does Ambrose’s problem
mirror it?
5. What happened to Ambrose in the toolshed when he was
ten? How did it influence his later life? Is the lyre
important?
6. What does Ambrose see under the boardwalk? How
does it affect him?
7. What is odd about Ambrose’s invitation to Magda to
accompany him through the funhouse? How can you
explain it?
8. What metaphors for a life, or the world of fiction, can
you develop as effectively as Barth does in the
funhouse?
9. How do the “head” and “eye” getting in the way affect
the self-consciousness theme dramatized in the
technique of the story? Is there a “human tragedy” in
this problem?
10. Is Barth in danger here of turning the medium into the
merchandise as well as into his message? What subject
other than fiction itself would writers be in so expert a
position to offer their readers? On what topics did
Homer, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe,
Lawrence, and others purport to be experts? On what
authority did they write of these subjects? Why might
writers of Barth’s period lack the confidence of earlier
ones in exploring parallel realms of knowledge?
11. If the “Funhouse” were to replace Eliot’s “Waste Land”
as the reigning metaphor for contemporary culture,
would it make a difference?
Donald Barthelme (1931–1989)
Contributing Editors: Linda Wagner-Martin and Charles
Molesworth
The brevity and irony of Barthelme’s work are sometimes
surprising to students. Again, the high modernist quality—
every word crafted for its purpose, but caught in a web of style
and form that makes the whole seem artlessly natural—must
be explained. Students may have read less contemporary
fiction than modern and what contemporary fiction they have
read may well be limited to the genres of romance, science
fiction, and mystery. As with any period of art, the
determining craft and language practices need explication.
In the case of such a short selection, ask students to
write about the work at the beginning of the class—and again
at the end, once discussion has finished—something simple
like “What were your reactions to this work?” Then ask them
to compare their two answers with the hope of showing them
that reading must be an active process, that they must form
opinions. And in this author’s case, getting his readers to
respond is his first priority.
Issues
People’s inability to learn to live in their culture, and the
omnipresent romantic attitudes that society continues to
inscribe, whatever the subject being considered, are the main
subjects of Barthelme’s fiction. At base is the belief that
people will endure, will eventually figure it out. Barthelme’s
fiction is, finally, positive—even optimistic—but first readings
may not give that impression.
Discuss the way humor is achieved, the interplay between
irony and humor, the effects of terse and unsentimental
language—students must be given ways of understanding why
this story has the effect it does.
Contemporary fiction—whether minimalist or highly
contrived parodic or allusive and truly postmodern—needs
much more attention in the classroom. Connections must be
made between writing students already understand, such as
Ernest Hemingway’s, and more recent work, so that they see
the continuum of artistry that grows from one generation to the
next.
Original Audience
Anticonservative in many ways, Barthelme’s fiction taunts the
current society and its attitudes at every turn. The teacher will
have to be subtle in not claiming that “we all” think the way
Barthelme does, or the legions of all-American conservatives
will be on his or her doorsteps; but the fiction itself can do a
great deal to start students examining their own social
attitudes.
Barthelme is given as a kind of example of metafiction, which
flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. Interesting approaches can
be created by contrasting this fiction with much of that by
writers of minority cultural groups—James Welch, Alice
Walker—to see how such fiction differs.
Bibliography
The Teachings of Don B., ed. Kim Herzinger, 1993. Also, see
The Ironist Saved from Drowning: The Fiction of Donald
Barthelme (University of Missouri, 1983), by Charles
Molesworth, where this story is discussed in detail.
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)
Contributing Editor: Derek C. Maus
Reading Pynchon’s work is never an easy task, but it can be
especially daunting for a student approaching his work for the
first time. Even in this relatively early story, Pynchon’s broad
range of knowledge is on display and students will need to
understand references to everything from the Laws of
thermodynamics to the music theory behind jazz to the
progressive historical model of Henry Adams’s Education. As
several critics have noted (and Pynchon himself freely admits),
one need not be a physicist to understand entropy at the level
in which Pynchon is using it as a guiding metaphor in this
story. A very basic discussion of entropy in the context of
thermodynamics and information theory will greatly enhance
the comprehension of the story. Critic David Seed claims that
a simple explanation of the dictionary definitions of entropy
suffices in this regard, but additional reference to theorists like
Marshall McLuhan or Norbert Wiener (both of whom Pynchon
cites as influences upon his writing) could be useful in a
course beyond an introductory level.
In addition to the difficult subject matter, the language
of the charac-ters, especially those in Meatball Mulligan’s
apartment, may be difficult for the students to understand,
since much of it is specific to the story’s 1957 setting.
Instructors may have to “translate” phrases like “tea time” or
the jazzy slang used by the Duke di Angelis quartet.
Furthermore, Pynchon includes a number of untranslated
foreign words or phrases in the story, thus creating a further
difficulty for most readers. In sum, the language of the story
presents a number of obstacles for readers, even those fairly
accustomed to complex material.
A good point of entry for discussion of the story is
Pynchon’s satire, which ranges from an indictment of the
falsity of “American expatriates around Washington” to the
absurdity of music played without instruments. Having the
students discern which characters Pynchon seems to be
holding up for ridicule and which he seems to treat with more
sympathy can shed some light on the ways in which the
various forms of entropy are used as metaphors. For example,
ask the students whether or not they find themselves siding
more with Meatball, Saul, or Callisto and then have them
discuss whether or not they think this is consistent with
Pynchon’s intention. What are the differences in their
respective reactions to the force of entropy in their lives?
Correspondingly, what are the differences that underlay their
perceptions of entropy in the first place? Are all three
characters’ attitudes satirized or does Pynchon favor one of
them?
Aubade’s role in the story also serves as a good
discussion starter. Her breaking the window (thus disrupting
the hermetically sealed environment of Callisto’s apartment) is
the final action in the story and to some extent unifies the two
separate narrative strands. Have the students discuss the way
Pynchon describes her actions in musical terms and compare
this with the satirical portrayal of the jazz musicians in
Meatball’s apartment.
Issues
In addition to entropy, the story contains a pointed critique of
attitudes associated with the so-called “Lost Generation” of
American literary history. A number of the characters,
especially Callisto, embody attitudes that can be read as
parodies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Also, note the
satirical reference to the shallow culture of the “American
expatriates” in 1957 and the ways in which the party at
Meatball’s is a parody of modernist depictions of intellectual
profligacy (cf. The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, or The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). Such a discussion can be
used as a gateway for exploring the differences between
modernist and postmodernist literature.
Have the students discuss Pynchon’s lack of transitions
between the two narratives (Meatball’s apartment vs.
Callisto’s apartment) and how this potentially disorienting
technique both supports the central themes of the story (i.e.,
order, even in the elements of a story, is illusory) and also
serves to accentuate the ambiguity of the ending.
Original Audience
It may be useful to contextualize the story both in terms of its
original 1960 publication in Kenyon Review and as part of the
1984 book Slow Learner. Since the initial audience was
minuscule (both because of the small circulation of the journal
and Pynchon’s relative lack of notoriety), a discussion of the
different cultural milieu into which the story emerged upon its
larger-scale publication twenty-four years later can bear
significant fruit. Also, reading from Pynchon’s selfdeprecating comments in the introduction to Slow Learner
may help students see how this story is in many ways an
emergent, but unpolished expression of ideas that Pynchon
would return to in much greater detail later in his work.
Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
Contributing Editor: Sue Houchins
For the last twenty years I have taught at a women’s college
where ninety-five percent of the population is what we call
“the traditional age,” seventeen through twenty-two years old.
These students always express dismay at three violent
episodes, all of them in this section: Eva’s maternal
infanticide, Sula’s digital immolation, and Chicken Little’s
accidental death. I have as yet found no way to soften, prior to
their reading the text, students’ outrage. However, their
discomfort is allayed by our discussion of the text and of
Morrison’s exploration in this book and in Beloved of the
figure of the mother who believes she “owns her offspring”
(and, therefore, who reasons she has the right to exercise the
ultimate decision over her children) and our conclusion that
Morrison is not advocating abuse of authority.
Some of you might also encounter the argument that
Morrison engages in a vilification/feminist castration of
African-American men. I suppose some might point to
Boyboy in this selection as an example of the denigration of
the black man; however, I would suggest that the narrator, if
not Eva, shows some compassion toward this figure who was
dragged west by his employer and who despite his posturing
was “defeat[ed]” by life. Further, the passages on manlove
delight in black men, celebrate their sexuality, and rejoice in
their verbal skills. I contend that the allegations against
Morrison arise from an erroneous assumption that to write
about gender is to ignore race, or, in the words of some
theorists, the discourse of race and the discourse of gender are
mutually exclusive. Critics such as Dorine Kondo and Mae
Henderson would argue that they are not, that few have
learned to read and hear race and gender together. I hope the
following will suggest some strategies for doing so.
Issues
This selection from Morrison’s Sula constitutes some of the
most hotly contested passages in African-American women’s
fiction. As you are undoubtedly aware, a number of critics—
among them Barbara Smith in “Toward a Black Feminist
Critical Theory”—suggest that, embedded within these
chapters that celebrate “manlove” and heterosexuality, there is
a lesbian “disloyal” subtext (see Teresa de Lauretis, “Sexual
Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” in Performing
Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre edited by
Sue Ellen Case for a discussion of this term). Whether you
choose to explore in your classroom this homosexual reading
is up to you; however, these chapters demand that you discuss
the following issues of race, gender, and sexuality: (1) the
social construction of race through the figure of Tarbaby and
the trope of Carpenter’s Road, named after Boyboy’s
employer, which defines and delimits the town; (2) the social
construction of gender and its problematizing through Eva’s
“test[ing] and argu[ing]” with her gentlemen callers while at
the same time espousing a philosophy of a wife’s duty to be
the obedient helpmeet, Eva’s matriarchal dominion over the
house she crafted, through Hannah’s sexual agency and the
danger she represents to married couples, through the sexual
autonomy exercised by the three generations of women in
Eva’s household; (3) the social construction of heterosexuality
in the discourse on “manlove”; (4) the social construction of
motherhood and its problematizing through the story of saving
the infant Plum, the myth of Eva’s sacrificed leg, the killing of
her only son, and Hannah’s remark about loving but not liking
Sula.
The “theme” of mother-daughter relationships is
sometimes expanded to include the bond of female friendship,
such as the one depicted between Nel and Sula. Traditionally
feminist critics read the girls’ intimacy through a Chodorowian
paradigm that, to summarize too simplistically, posits that
female friendships reproduce the experiences of being
mothered and of mothering and, therefore, are in some ways
symbiotic and, thus, are related to pre-Oedipal stages in
psychic development (see Nancy Chodorow, Reproducing
Motherhood ). Such readings hint at strategies for deploying
subtle Freudian interpretations of parts of this selection: for
example, to explain the digital mutilation, the hole-digging
episodes, the death of Chicken Little, and Eva’s amputation.
The inquiry into the development of our cultural understanding
of childhood is obviously related to the tropes of adolescent
female friendships and a female’s development into sexual
maturity. Some examples are girlhood (remember the book
ends with Nel recalling and lamenting, “We was girls
together”) and the enigmatic deweys appropriated by Eva and
transformed by her in the community’s imagination.
In addition, these passages introduce a number of
themes that are reiterated in succeeding novels: scapegoating
(of Boyboy by Eva, of Hannah by the townswomen, National
Suicide Day as a variation on scapegoating, Pilate in Song of
Solomon, or Sethe as the outcast in Beloved ); flying (read
Chicken Little’s death against Eva’s fall later in Solomon, or
the myth of Solomon’s flight in the same novel—the folktale
of the “flying African” recounted many times in slave
narratives—see Virginia Hamilton’s When People Could Fly,
a children’s book); symbolic naming—for example, Shadrack,
or Nel, whose name reverses the letters in the heart of her
mother’s name, Helene; the house, as in Beloved or other
geographical sites—such as the Bottom in Sula or “Not Doctor
Street” in Song of Solomon—as characters in the text.
You might find it fruitful to place Morrison’s work within the
tradition of magical realism. Like her Latin American
colleagues, her work is almost epic in scope, chronicling as it
does the history of a people over five decades, for it begins in
medias res and then looks back to the antebellum period when
the first blacks settled in the area that was to be known as
Medallion. This small Ohio town and the three generations of
the Peace matriarchy that inhabit the house at 7 Carpenter’s
Road write in microcosm the struggle of the African American
down from the bottom, thus critiquing the myth of the
American dream, the legend of “up from slavery.” In addition,
faithful to the dictates of the genre, Morrison paints the small
town landscape, portrays almost every African-American
character, represents linguist and cultural idiosyncrasies with
an almost surreal/super-real clarity; and yet at the core of this
descriptive fidelity is the incongruent, the illogical, the
intuitive, the magical.
Original Audience
I believe that all of Morrison’s novels have been written for a
culturally diverse audience. While each work is situated within
the black American community (U.S. or Caribbean), focuses
almost exclusively on African-American characters, and draws
upon black folk traditions and folktales, her books seem to
appeal to a wide spectrum of readers as evidenced by the
selection of Sula by the Book-of-the-Month-Club, of Beloved
for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and the award of the Nobel Prize in
Literature to Morrison in 1993.
Houses, such as Eva’s on Carpenter’s Road or Baby Suggs and
Sethe’s on Bluestone Road (Beloved ), figure importantly,
albeit ambiguously throughout the history of black women’s
writing. So you might compare and contrast Eva’s
imprisonment but relative power with the plight of Linda
Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or of the
protagonist in Our Nig, or compare her to Silla in Paule
Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Marshall’s first novel is
also excellent for comparing the treatment of a girl’s
achievement of psychic and sexual maturity. Meridian by
Alice Walker may serve as another example of a text that
examines an adolescent’s growing to sexuality, genderpolitical issues between black men and women, troubled
mother-daughter relations, and the female hero as outcast.
Michelle Cliff’s Abeng treats many of the same themes—
especially the episode of hunting the wild pig and the killing
of Miss Mattie’s prize bull—in the life of a Jamaican girl and
even recounts the myth of the flying African. Richard Perry’s
Montgomery’s Children deliberately draws upon the same
themes and folk motifs as Sula and Song of Solomon. Look at
Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place for a portrait of
mother-son relations.
Study and discussion questions: Ask students to research the
biblical derivation of the appropriate characters’ names and to
ascribe significance to the choice of appellation. For example,
what radical theology is suggested when the character of Eve,
temptress and sinner, is termed “creator and sovereign”? Or
what is the significance of Hannah’s namesake, the mother of
Samson? It might be helpful to assign some students the task
of contextualizing the novel by researching significant events
in African-American political, intellectual, and social history
from 1919 (the beginning of Sula) until the end of the
selection. Also, you can ask for a reading of a troubling
passage (that is, the killing of Chicken Little, Nel and Sula
digging holes in the field) or troubling characters (Shadrack,
Tarbaby, the deweys).
Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
Contributing Editor: Michael Boccia
Ishmael Reed frequently offends readers, who feel that they
and the institutions they hold sacred (the church, American
history, schools, etc.) are attacked and ridiculed by him. His
humorous exaggerations and sharp barbs are misunderstood
partly because satire and irony are so often misunderstood. In
addition, most students are ignorant of the many contributions
to American culture made by blacks and other minorities.
Black and minority contributions in every field are highlighted
in Reed’s work. Reed often lists his historical, mythical, or
literary sources in the text itself and has his own version of
history, politics, literature, and culture.
Pointing out that Reed is a jokester and a humorous
writer often makes his work more palatable to students. Once
they begin to laugh at Reed’s humor, they can take a more
objective look at his condemnations of society. Of course,
students refuse to accept his version of history, politics, and
religion. Most commonly, students want to know if Reed’s
version of the “truth” is really true. They challenge his veracity
whenever he challenges their beliefs. This permits me to send
them off to check on Reed’s statements, which proves
rewarding and enlightening for them.
Of course, Reed does not want readers to accept a single
viewpoint; he wishes our view of reality to be multi-faceted. In
Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Church, many “truths” are accepted. In
fact, one source that is extremely helpful in understanding
Reed’s viewpoint is the “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” (Los
Angeles Free Press [18–24 Sept. 1969]: 42).
Issues
Reed covers the gamut of issues, writing about politics, social
issues, racism, history, and just about everything else. Most of
his satire is aimed at the status quo, and thus he often offends
readers. It is important to remind students that he is writing
satire, but that there is truth to his comic attacks on the
establishment. Closely related to his allusions to black artists
and history are his themes. He views the counterculture as the
vital force in life and hopefully predicts that the joyous side of
life will triumph over the repressive side.
His radical beliefs appear as themes in his work.
Knowledge of the cultures (popular, American, African, etc.)
Reed draws upon is very helpful. Knowing about black history
and literature is very valuable and can best be seen through
Reed’s eyes by reading his own commentary. Shrovetide in
Old New Orleans is especially helpful in this area.
Reed’s vision of history cries out for the recognition of
minority contribution to Western civilization. Estaban (the
black slave who led Cortez to the Grand Canyon), Squanto
(the Native American who fed the Pilgrims), Sacajawea (the
Native American woman who helped Lewis and Clark), and
many other minority contributors are referred to in Reed’s
work, and because students are often ignorant of these
contributions, some small survey of minority history is very
useful.
Reed’s originality is rooted in his experimental forms, so
introducing the traditional art forms that Reed distorts often
helps readers understand his experiments. A survey of the
forms of novels, journalism, television and radio programs,
movies, newsreels, popular dances, and music will help
students understand the fractured forms Reed offers.
The symbols Reed selects also reflect the eclectic nature
of his art, in that the symbols and their meanings include but
transcend traditional significance. Reed will blend symbols
from ancient Egypt with rock and roll, or offer the flip side of
history by revealing what went on behind the veil of history as
popularly reported. In all cases one will find much stimulation
in the juxtaposition of Reed’s symbols and contexts.
Original Audience
The students are often angry at Reed’s satire of their culture.
The provocation that they feel is precisely the point of Reed’s
slashing wit. He wants to provoke them into thinking about
their culture in new ways. Pointing this out to students often
alleviates their anger.
Introducing students to Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is an
effective way to clarify how Reed’s satire functions. Few
readers think that eating babies is a serious proposal by Swift,
and once satire is perceived as an exaggeration meant to stir
controversy and thought, students are willing to listen to
Reed’s propositions.
Placing Reed in literary context is difficult because he
writes in numerous genres and borrows from many nonliterary
art forms. No doubt his innovations place him with writers like
James Joyce and William Blake, and his satire places him
among the most controversial writers of any literary period.
Certainly his use of allusion and motif is reminiscent of
T. S. Eliot or James Joyce, but Reed likes to cite black writers
as his models. Reed feels that the minorities have been
slighted, and a review of some of the black writers he cites as
inspiration is often helpful to students.
Students respond well to hunting down the literary, historical,
and topical references in the poetry. I often ask them to select a
single motif, such as Egyptian myth, and track it through a
poem after researching the area.
Bibliography
I strongly recommend reading Reed on Reed: Shrovetide in
Old New Orleans, especially “The Old Music,” “Self
Interview,” “Remembering Josephine Baker,” and “Harlem
Renaissance.”
For a detailed discussion of his literary and critical
stances, see John O’Brien, “Ishmael Reed Interview,” The New
Fiction, Interviews with Inno-vative American Writers, edited
by David Bellamy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974,
130–41.
For a view of the Dionysian/Appollonian struggle as
portrayed by Reed, see Sam Keen, “Manifesto for a Dionysian
Theology,” Transcendence, edited by Herbert W. Richardson.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1969: 31–52.
Karen Tei Yamashita (b. 1951)
Teaching material for Karen Tei Yamashita is available on The
Jessica Hagedorn (b. 1949)
Teaching material for Jessica Hagedorn is available on The
Lee Smith (b. 1944)
Teaching material for Lee Smith is available on The Heath
Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
Teaching material for Dorothy Allison is available on The
Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)
Teaching material for Sherman Alexie is available on The
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith (b. 1929)
Most students know nothing about the author or the context of
this selection. Useful information can be found in Hinojosa’s
interview included in Chicano Authors, Inquiry by Interview
(Juan Bruce-Novoa).
I find it useful to ask students to write an accurate
version of something they have experienced as a group: a short
reading, a brief video, or even a planned interruption in class
by an outsider. They then must consider the differences in the
accounts of the same event. Sometimes I ask them to write an
accurate description of an object I place in their midst; then we
compare versions.
They respond to the element of different versions and
observe how justice, represented in the newspaper reports, is
not necessarily served. They ask if the person is guilty, raising
the question of what is guilt.
Issues
The major themes are the search for an accurate version of any
event in the midst of the proliferation of information; the
conflict between oral and written texts; the historical disregard
for the Chicano community in South Texas and elsewhere; and
the placement of the author in the role of cultural detective.
The selection can be read as an allegory of Chicano culture
within U.S. history in which Mexicans have been criminalized
without a fair hearing.
The basic form is that of a criminal investigation, related to the
detective story. Yet it breaks with the genre in that it does not
resolve the case by discovery of the culprit; instead, the frame
of the story maintains its position, and—if anything—gets
worse, the degradation of process reflected in the errata
contained in the final segment.
Fragmentation does not bother students much now. The
small units emphasize the postmodern experience of life as
short sound bites.
The style is marked by shifts in voices, an attempt to
capture the community in its speech patterns.
Original Audience
In the period of Chicano renewal (1965–1975) there was a
need expressed then in literature to search for communal
history. It was aimed at an audience that would sympathize
with the victim, considering itself an abused and ignored group
in a society controlled by the forces represented in the
newspaper clippings that frame the story. This has changed.
Now audiences are much less sympathetic to marginal peoples,
and even Chicanos are not as willing to accept the old version
of oppression of minority groups.
Faulkner’s creation of a fictional county in several works
coincides well with Hinojosa’s project. The use of multiple
voices to give different perspectives is quite similar.
1. I ask students to consider what is history. What is news
reporting? What is a fact? I often ask them to look up
the etymology of fact and consider its relation to
manufacture.
2. Assign the reporting of an imaginary event; give them
the basic facts and characters and even an official
summary statement. Then have them reconstruct the
fragments as seen from one perspective. Compare the
papers.
Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
Contributing Editor: Claudia Tate
Students need to be taught to empathize with the racial, sexual,
and class characteristics of the persona inscribed in Lorde’s
works. Such empathy will enable them to understand the basis
of Lorde’s value formation.
Students immediately respond to Lorde’s courage to
confront a problem, no matter what its difficulty, and to her
deliberate inscription of the anguish that problem has caused
her. Both the confrontation and the acknowledged pain serve
as her vehicle for resolving the problem.
It is difficult to secure the entire corpus of her published
work. Most libraries have only those works published after
1982. Many of those published prior to this date are out of
print.
To address this issue, I have made special orders for
texts that are still in print and asked the library to place them
on reserve. In other cases, I have selected specific works from
these early texts and photocopied them for class use.
Issues
Lorde’s work focuses on lyricizing large historical and social
issues in the voice of a black woman. This vantage point
provides stringent social commentary on white male, middleclass, heterosexual privilege inherent in the dominant culture,
on the one hand, and on the disadvantage accorded to those
who diverge from this so-called standard. In addition, students
should be aware that there have historically been racial and
class biases between white and black feminists concerning
issues that centralize racial equality, like enfranchisement,
work, and sexuality.
Students studying Lorde’s poetry should familiarize
themselves with the aesthetic and rhetorical demands of the
lyrical mode. In addition, they should be prepared for the high
degree of intimacy inscribed in Lorde’s work.
Although Lorde is known primarily as a poet, she also wrote a
substantial amount of prose. Her most prominent prose
includes The Cancer Journals (1980), the record of her
struggle with breast cancer; Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
(1982), an autobiography; and Sister Outsider (1984), a collection of essays and speeches. Students should be encouraged to
explore Lorde’s prose in order to see how genre mediates the
expression of her most salient themes. Comparisons can also
be drawn with the work of Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and
Ntozake Shange in order to stress the intimacy of the womancentered problematic that informs and structures Lorde’s work.
Bibliography
Over the last decade Lorde has attracted considerable scholarly
interest. See the headnote for a listing of recent criticism. Also
see the selections in Home-making: Women Writers and the
Politics and Poetics of Home, eds. Catherine Wiley and Fiona
R. Barnes; Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color,
ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson; New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and
Cultural Readings, ed. Sally Munt; Some of Us Are Brave, eds.
Barbara Smith et al.; Sturdy Black Bridges, eds. Gloria Hull et
al.; Color, Sex, and Poetry, edited by Gloria Hull; and Wild
Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne M. Braxton.
John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941)
Contributing Editor: James W. Coleman
I usually start by discussing the students’ typical responses to
Wideman with them. Students, like most readers generally,
want to read linear narratives that purport to relate directly to
their lives, or that they can visualize in a clear real-world
context, and the aspects of Wideman’s works that challenge
their notions about narratives and their approaches to reading
put them off. I ask them to examine their very traditional
assumptions about narratives, about how narratives should
relate to them, and about how they should read and judge
fiction. Another question that I eventually ask is whether
Wideman might have a purpose (beyond the desire to be a
difficult writer) for writing as he does. And what is one of the
first things about Wideman’s fiction that they should see
before they try to determine his meaning and relate to his work
in their usual fashion?
They should see that Wideman disrupts their normal
narrative approach because as he questions and tests the
process in which he engages as the writer, he wants readers to
question what they do too. If students will think about it, they
will see that words written on a page cannot replicate the
concreteness, complexity, and convolution of their experience.
The language of a narrative may pretend to appear to do so,
but it cannot. This is one of the first things that Wideman
reminds them of and that they must accept when they approach
Wideman’s work. This does not mean that they should no
longer read narratives that give them what they expect. But
might there be a place for Wideman’s kind of writing, too?
Wideman shows students this, not to abdicate a social,
political, and real-life responsibility in his fiction, but to
indicate the difficulty of the writer’s task and the truth of what
narratives are and what they do. Some students, perhaps many,
however, will not be convinced by this. But some will
appreciate Wideman, and one can also generate a pretty good
discussion based on the students’ pure emotional response to
fiction such as Wideman’s that requires them to work so hard.
Issues
Wideman indeed portrays clear historical perspectives and
intense personal issues; however, in the context of his
postmodern approach, he also questions the ability of writing
to do fully and successfully what he wants it to do. In the
selection in The Heath Anthology, “Valaida,” the Jewish
experience of the Holocaust and the African-American
historical experience of racism intersect, and Wideman also
foregrounds the life and history of a black entertainer, Valaida
Snow, whom few of us know. In a historical perspective,
racism and oppression are pervasive themes in Wideman’s
work.
If we move beyond “Valaida” to examine Wideman’s
work since 1981, we see him focusing very directly on himself
personally, on his family, and especially on the tragedies and
tribulations of specific family members. Wideman’s fiction
often takes as a theme the very thing that he struggles with as a
writer—the quest to be a black writer who writes about the
black community and its experience and makes a difference
through his writing. Wideman sometimes makes himself (or a
surrogate writer figure) a character in his fiction, and shows
himself as a character undergoing the struggle that he
undergoes as a writer in real life. He writes intimately about
people in his family and about a community of black people in
the process.
The tragic stories of Wideman’s brother and son have
also become major aspects of his work since 1981. Starting in
Hiding Place (1981) and Damballah (1981) and reaching a
focus in the semifictional Brothers and Keepers (1984),
Wideman deals with his relationship to his younger brother
Robby, jailed for life for robbery and murder. And in
Philadelphia Fire (1990), some of the stories in All Stories Are
True (1993); and Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and
Sons, Race and Society (1994), he talks to his incarcerated son.
As I have been saying, Wideman will seem very
unconventional to many student readers. He uses modernist
techniques and creates dense modernist fictional forms in his
early work, but the majority of his work since 1981 utilizes
postmodernist approaches and techniques. However, this later
work also draws increasingly on black cultural forms, on
religious rituals and practices, black folk stories, and black
street ways, for example. “Valaida” is a story that combines a
postmodernist approach with the traditional African-American
themes of racism and oppression.
Original Audience
Wideman has always enjoyed high praise from critics,
intellectuals, and some academics, but he has never had a wide
general audience. Few undergraduates have heard of
Wideman, and fewer have read anything by him. Yet
Wideman’s books continue to win awards, and critics continue
to praise him. Perhaps Wideman’s work draws acclaim from
critics, intellectuals, and academics for the same reason (its
complexity and ingenuity) that it denies access to more general
readers.
On the one hand, Wideman provides a contrast to other black
writers who do not make the writing itself an explicit theme,
and this is the large majority of them, I think. This would
include so difficult and complex a writer as Toni Morrison,
who manages to keep her focus on the theme of black struggle
without foregrounding the problems and difficulties of writing
the narrative itself. But on the other hand, there are black
writers such as Charles Johnson who share concerns about
writing similar to Wideman’s, and Wideman’s thematic
concern with racism and the black cultural tradition connects
him strongly to the black literary tradition generally. I would
also point out that Wideman’s work separates itself from the
radical textuality, the complete focus on language and the
workings of the narrative, of such white writers as Raymond
Federman and Ronald Sukenick. And the reality of Wideman’s
narratives is not the same detached reality of a writer such as
Thomas Pynchon.
The following study questions may be helpful for “Valaida”:
How do the story’s style and form force you to approach it?
What is the connection of the italicized section at the
beginning to the rest of the story? What is the relationship
between the story Mr. Cohen tells Mrs. Clara and the
beginning section? What is Mr. Cohen trying to do by telling
Mrs. Clara the story? How do style, form, and theme coalesce
in the story? Students might start to approach writing about
“Valaida” by looking at this convergence of style, form, and
theme and the resulting tension between postmodernist
treatment and social and political intention.
Bibliography
Although Wideman published his first book in 1967 and has
published thirteen books since then, one still finds a relative
dearth of work about him. The most comprehensive source is
James W. Coleman’s Blackness and Modernism: The Literary
Career of John Edgar Wideman (1989), which has an
interview with Wideman as an appendix. Other helpful
interviews are John O’Brien’s in Interviews with Black Writers
(1973) and Wilfred Samuel’s “Going Home: A Conversation
with John Edgar Wideman,” Callallo 6 (February 1983): 40–
59. Good analyses of Wideman’s works also appear in Bernard
W. Bell’s The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987);
Michael G. Cooke’s Afro-American Literature in the
Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (1981); and
Trudier Harris’s Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary
Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984). Kermit Frazier’s “The
Novels of John Wideman,” Black World, v. 24, 8 (1975): 18–
35 is one of the very first pieces on Wideman and is still
useful. The Callabo special issue on Wideman, v. 22, 3
(Summer 1999), is a very important addition to the scholarly
work on the writer.
Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)
Contributing Editors: Amy Ling and King-Kok Cheung
The primary question for any initial reading of Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior has to do with genre or form. Is this text
nonfiction? (It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
the best book of nonfiction published in 1976.) Since the word
“memoirs” is in the title, is it autobiography? Or is it a piece of
imaginative fiction, which seems most apparent in the “White
Tigers” chapter included in this anthology? The Woman
Warrior, of course, is all of the above, sequentially and
simultaneously.
As Kingston does not maintain a unity of genre, neither
does she maintain a unity of diction. “White Tigers” begins
with a colloquial tone, a woman speaking informally about her
Chinese-American female upbringing. It then goes into a
conditional tense and a story-telling mode—“The call would
come from a bird that flew over our roof ”—into a narration
filled with magical details, described at times in a matter-offact manner, at other times in an elevated, poetic style. Then,
without warning, the language and the subject matter lapse
abruptly from the fanciful to the everyday in the sudden,
disruptive line, “My American life has been such a
disappointment.” In diction and language also, The Woman
Warrior is dialogic.
“White Tigers” has been called by David Leiwei Li, “a
version of the Kung Fu movie interspliced with a Western.”
Feminists, however, admire the anger and power of the female
avenger whose patient and lengthy training enables her to slice
off the head of the misogynist baron in one stroke. Chinese
Americans appreciate Hong Kingston’s skill not only in
beautifully elaborating on a popular ancient Chinese ballad,
“The Magnolia Lay,” but in making its traditional Chinese
heroine relevant to a contemporary Chinese-American girl’s
life.
Issues
Since her mother’s talking-story was one of the major forces
of her childhood and since she herself is now talking-story in
writing this book, stories, factual and fictional, are an inherent
part of Kingston’s autobiography. Finding one’s voice in order
to talk-story, a metaphor for knowing oneself in order to attain
the fullness of one’s power, becomes one of the book’s major
themes.
As the second chapter of a five-chapter book, “White
Tigers” is best understood in the context and thematic structure
of the entire work. The book’s first chapter, “No Name
Woman,” tells the story of the paternal aunt who bears a child
out of wedlock and is harried by the villagers and by her
family into drowning herself; the family now punishes this
taboo-breaker by never speaking of her, by denying her her
name. The author, however, breaks the family silence by
writing about this rebel whom she calls “my forebear.” “No
Name Woman” presents the cautionary tale of woman as
victim; “White Tigers,” however, provides the model to
emulate. This pattern, woman as victim then victor, is repeated
throughout the text.
In like manner, Kingston inverts historical misogynist
Chinese practices, such as footbinding and female infanticide,
by claiming that perhaps women’s feet were bound because
women were so strong. Victory over handicaps, over racial and
sexual devaluation is Kingston’s purpose.
One of the distinctive accomplishments of The Woman
Warrior is that it crosses boundaries between genres, dictions,
styles, between fact and fiction, as it crosses the boundaries
between cultures, Chinese and American. In the collage of
style and form, in the amalgam of language and content, in the
combination of Chinese myth, family history, and American
individualism and rebelliousness, Kingston defines herself as a
Chinese-American woman.
Original Audience
The Woman Warrior is decidedly a product of the sixties, of
the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. It directly
addresses Chinese Americans, whom it seeks to bring into its
exploration of identity, but, as an immigrant story for a nation
of immigrants, it is obviously intended as well for a
mainstream audience.
Like other women and ethnic writers such as Leslie Marmon
Silko, Toni Morrison, and Adrienne Rich who appropriated
and revisioned myths for their own uses, so Kingston
appropriated the tale of the legendary Fa Mulan for her own
purposes. The original ballad of the Chinese woman warrior is
recorded in a fifth-century ballad of sixty-two lines; Kingston
elaborates considerably on this ballad. Her most significant
addition, however, is the woman warrior’s marriage and
childbearing while still in armor disguised as a man. In the
original ballad, Mulan performs these roles sequentially; in
Kingston’s version, simultaneously. With this change,
Kingston crosses gender barriers and separate spheres, creating
a heroine who is at once a feared warrior and a tender mother.
1. Which aspects of Kingston’s childhood experience is
true of all immigrants in the United States? What is
particular to Chinese Americans?
2. Of what use is the fabulous story of the woman warrior
to the daily life of the narrator?
3. Has Kingston in her life inverted the woman as victim
into woman as victor? Research and explain.
Bibliography
Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto,
Maxine Hong
Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993).
———. “ ‘Don’t Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple
and The
Woman Warrior.” PMLA (Mar. 1988): 162–74.
———. “The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific:
Must a
Chinese American Critic Choose between
Feminism and Heroism?”
Conflicts in
Feminism. Ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller.
New York: Routledge, 1990, 234–51.
Hunt, Linda. 1985. “ ‘I Could Not Figure Out What Was My
Village’:
Gender vs. Ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman
Warrior.” MELUS (1985) 12.3: 5–12.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. “Cultural Mis-readings by American
Reviewers.”
Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New
Cultural Identities. Ed.
Guy Amirthanayagam.
London: Macmillan, 1982, 55–65.
Lee, Rachel C. “Claiming Land, Claiming Voice, Claiming
Canon:
Institutionalized Challenges in Kingston’s China
Men and The Woman
Warrior.” ReViewing Asian
America: Locating Diversity. Ed. Wendy
Ng et
al. Pullman: Washington State University Press. 1995, 147–59.
Li, David Leiwei. “The Naming of a Chinese American ‘I’:
Cross-Cultural
Sign/ification in The Woman
Warrior.” Criticism (1988) 30.4:
497–515.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, ed. Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s
The Woman
Warrior. New York: Modern Language
Association, 1991.
Ling, Amy. “Maxine Hong Kingston and the Dialogic
Dilemma of Asian
American Writers.” In Having
Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition
in TwentiethCentury America. Ed. Harriet Pollack. Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1995.
Rabine, Leslie W. “No Lost Paradise: Social Gender and
Symbolic Gender
in the Writings of Maxine
Hong Kingston.” Signs 12 (1987): 471–92.
Schueller, Malini. “Questioning Race and Gender Definitions:
Dialogic
Subversions in The Woman Warrior.” Criticism
31.4 (1989): 421–37.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “Necessity and Extravagance in
Maxine Hong
Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Art
and the Ethnic Experience.”
MELUS 15.1 (1988):
3–26.
———. “Ethnic Dimensions of Postmodern Indeterminacy:
Maxine Hong
Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as
Avant-garde Autobiography.” In
Autobiographie and Avant-garde, ed. Alfred Hornung and
Ernstpeter
Ruhe. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992,
273–84.
———. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity
to Extrava
gance. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993.
Gish Jen (b. 1955)
Contributing Editor: Bonnie TuSmith
The father’s patriarchal and feudal attitudes can easily arouse
feminist ire. While such attitudes need to be acknowledged
and discussed, it is important to point out the narrator’s
viewpoint toward her father. The narrator pulls no punches in
pointing out Ralph Chang’s sexist and domineering ways.
Such information does not, however, trigger brooding
resentment or a desire for vengeance. In addressing this issue
in the classroom, the instructor might combine feminist and
cultural theories to promote a richer understanding of
difference.
Issues
A key theme found in Jen’s work is the Asian immigrant’s
coming to terms with American society. For people who come
from cultures that are significantly different from the
hegemonic European one, the process of acculturation can be
awkward and even destructive. Like the father’s western suit,
Asians who take on what they consider typically American
culture often find that this does not fit well. The mother’s
statement “But this here is the U—S—of—A!” reveals the disease with which nonwhite, non-Europeans attempt to
assimilate into European American society. Historically
excluded from the “good life,” Americans of Asian descent
necessarily exhibit ambivalence toward symbols of American
success, such as the town country club that is about to be sued
by a waiting black family.
The two-part structure of the story offers us a view of the
father’s feudal lord behavior in two different settings. In the
first, treating his employees like servants—even if done
magnanimously—simply does not work. In the second, the
same arrogant impulse stands him in good stead when
confronting racism. The structure gives us a clear picture of
Ralph Chang’s background and personality and enables us to
consider the appropriateness of social behavior based on class
and cultural differences.
The use of an observer/child narrator who is older and
more reserved than the talkative younger sister Mona lends
credibility to the narration and situates the story in a
comfortable, firsthand point of view. The narrator’s English
fluency and assumption of her American birthright render her
voice easily accessible to a white audience. In this story, at
least, there are no barriers based on language.
Original Audience
“In the American Society” was first published in Southern
Review in 1986. It was subsequently anthologized in various
collections of contemporary literature and, in 1999, it was
included in Jen’s own short story collection, Who’s Irish? As
one of the author’s first published works and the prototype for
the Chang family in Typical American, the story has garnered
an academic audience of students, teachers, and scholars. Its
special blend of disarming humor and social commentary has
also rendered this and other works by Jen consistently
appealing to the general reader.
Jen’s stories are easily anthologized and can be compared to
numerous American short stories—immigrant, classic, and
ethnic—that explore issues of Americanization and the
tensions that exist among various American cultures.
In teaching ethnic literature I use the approach of moving from
the familiar—what European-American students already know
about and have in common with all human beings as well as
what they know about literature—to the unfamiliar. This
strategy helps students and instructors get past their fear of
what seems foreign: namely the “exotic other.” Questions such
as the following might be helpful:
1. Describe the dynamics of this nuclear family. What is
the relationship of each family member to the others,
and how does this reflect or challenge your notions of
family?
2. Identify the source of humor in this story. How does
humor contribute to the tone, mood, and overall message
of the work?
3. How does the two-part narrative structure of the story
enable meaningful comparison/contrast between the
father’s own society and the rest of American society? Is
there ironic contrast between the two sections?
4. Does the dialogue seem realistic? How does the writer
use dialogue to convey the racist, sexist, and classist
attitudes of the characters?
Janice Mirikitani (b. 1942)
Contributing Editor: Shirley Lim
Students need to learn about the internment of JapaneseAmerican citizens during World War II. You might consider
reading historical extracts of laws passed against Japanese
Americans during internment or passages from books
describing camp life. If possible, show students paintings and
photographs of internment experience. Students tend to resist
issues of racism in mainstream white American culture;
counter this tendency by discussing the long history of
persecution of Asians on the West Coast.
Deal with the strong aural/oral quality of Mirikitani’s
writing—the strong protest voice.
Students often raise questions about the poet’s anger:
How personally does the reader take this? How successfully
has the poet expressed her anger and transformed it into
memorable poetry? What kinds of historical materials does the
poet mine? Why are these materials useful and significant?
Issues
Themes are the historical documentation of legislation against
Asians in the United States; internment during World War II;
Mirikitani’s father’s exper-ience in Tule Lake during World
War II; economic and psychological exper-iences of Japanese
Americans during that period; stereotypes of Asian-American
women in U.S. popular culture.
Consider the issue of protest and oral poetry; traditions of such
poetry in black literature in the 1960s and 1970s; influence of
“black is beautiful’ movement on Mirikitani.
Original Audience
Consider the didactic and sociopolitical nature of the writing: a
divided audience; her own people and an audience to be
persuaded and accused of past prejudices. Much of her poetry
was written in the 1970s at the peak of social protests against
white hegemony.
Compare her poems with Sonia Sanchez and Don L. Lee, for
example, on sociopolitical and minority concerns.
1. Personal accounts or observations of racism at work in
their own society.
2. How they themselves perceive Asian Americans; their
stereotypes of Asian-American women.
Bibliography
Refer to Mini Okubo’s books on camp life, the movie of the
Houstons’ book on Manzanar, and newspaper accounts of the
recent debate and settlement of repayments to Japanese
Americans for injustice done to them by the U.S. government
during their internment period. See also Deirdre Lashgari’s
“Disrupting the Deadly Stillness: Janice Mirikitani’s Poetics of
Violence” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing
as Transgression (Char-lottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1995); and Stan Yogi’s “Yearning for the Past: The
Dynamics of Memory in Sansei Internment Poetry” in
Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures (Boston:
Northeastern Univer-sity Press, 1996).
Kimiko Hahn (b. 1955)
Teaching material for Kimiko Hahn is available on The Heath
Gloria Anzaldúa (b. 1942)
Contributing Editor: Kristin Dietsche
Students may be challenged or even put off by Anzaldúa’s
tone, the non-linear form of her argument, her explicit
feminism, and her use of Spanish, Nahuatl, and Chicano
languages along with English. Students’ reactions to the work
may be the best place to begin a discussion of the text’s
challenges to linguistic, literary, and cultural boundaries, and
an instructor might begin to work on student resistance by
asking whether they considered themselves part of the
intended audience of Borderlands/La Frontera. A class might
work toward isolating those features that they found
persuasive or made them feel invited to enter the argument of
the text and those that may have made them feel excluded.
This exercise will position students on the borderlands of
Anzaldúa’s text and open a way to implement her own strategy
of transforming resistance into a consciousness that is able to
hold contradictory positions simultaneously.
The form of Borderlands resists traditional literary
classification, and its intentionally antiliterary qualities might
provide an entry into a discussion of the roles of both form and
intention in an ongoing discussion of canon. The text does not
fall easily into traditionally “privileged” genres like epic,
novel, lyric, short fiction, or even essay and autobiography.
She combines personal narrative, folklore, history, personal
revelation, and poetry and uses a wide range of seemingly
contradictory features from conversational slang to footnote
citations of academic authorities.
Students who keep reading journals might be asked to
stop and record their expectations for the text after reading the
first page of “Entering into the Serpent.” They might identify
features of narrative here and expect to read a first-person
short story, an expectation that is fully frustrated by the third
page. Experiences of confusion, uncertainty, and ambiguity
along with frustration at the failure of the text to follow a clear
narrative course can be legitimized in discussion as the class
works to understand why the author may want to provoke
these kinds of responses.
Anzaldúa has created a work that cannot be judged using
traditional critical tools. She speaks of her text instead as an
“Aztec-like” mosaic—“a weaving pattern, thin here, thick
there” (66) and, later, “a flawed thing, a clumsy, complex
groping thing” but alive (67). The text actively challenges both
what literature and feminist argument are supposed to be while
creating a new hybrid all its own. You might use a close
reading of the first para-graph of “A Tolerance for Ambiguity”
in La conciencia de la mestiza as a way to explore ways that
the form of the larger work reflects its thesis.
Original Audience
The potential audience for this work is a crucial question, and
since it is a fairly contemporary text students might be brought
into a discussion of whether they think they are a part of it. Is
she writing to speakers of all these languages, perhaps tejanas
or mestizas like herself, or is her audience broader? What is
the effect of writing in languages that the audience may not
understand? You may consider asking students who know
Spanish to talk about and translate some of the Spanish
passages. Do native speakers make different observations from
students studying Spanish as a second language? Are there
students who are able to identify different kinds of Spanish
used in the text or students who are familiar with the various
dialects she has chosen? You might also discuss the whole
issue of “translation”—and suggest Spanish speakers supply
missed nuance. Students can bring different linguistic
authority to an analysis of this text, illustrating that while this
work may be difficult, the traditional literary academy
(English professors) may not be the best place to look for the
right answers or the best interpretation. Instead, the reader
must consult a mestiza for answers and interpretation.
For Anzaldúa, the choice of language itself becomes a
significant personal and political decision, one as significant as
her challenge to political authority and patriarchal culture.
Language is a significant part of Anzaldúa’s cultural identity,
and she chooses border language to express her border self, a
self speaking from the languages of multiple cultures.
Connections might be made between Anzaldúa’s
argument and the experiences of students through an analysis
of the languages that define their own cultures. In Chapter 5 of
Borderlands, she lists some of the languages that Chicanos
speak:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Standard English
Working-class and slang English
Standard Spanish
Standard Mexican Spanish
5. North Mexican Spanish dialect
6. Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and
California have regional variations)
7. Tex-Mex
8. Pachuco (called caló)
Using this list as a starting point, students might be
encouraged to list the languages that they and their family
members speak. What kind of authority do these languages
hold? Are there social consequences for their use? Are these
languages complicit in structures of political power? Which of
these languages come from the borderlands? Do any have the
potential to express a “new mestiza consciousness”? While
Anzaldúa says that Spanish-speaking people accuse her of
either “speaking the oppressor’s language by speaking
English” or “ruining the Spanish language” by writing in
substandard dialect, she defends her choice of English and
Chicano Spanish. For people who are neither Spanish nor
English, she argues “what recourse is there left but to create
their own language” (55), and she maintains “Chicano Spanish
is not incorrect, it is a living language” (55).
From the borders of language and dialect a class might
list other borders that this work challenges—cultural,
historical, geographical, sexual, metaphysical, for instance.
This listing exercise might then be followed by a discussion of
which borders are “real” and which are “imaginary.” Here you
might examine “The Presences” in Entering into the Serpent.
Students might be encouraged to try to write in
Anzaldúa’s multi-voiced form in order to write about la
fronteras of their own cultural experiences. To do this, some
care should be taken to identify “borders” in your own
community: Where are they located? Who do they divide? Is
language an issue? Is there a potential for mestiza
consciousness?
Judith Ortiz Cofer (b. 1952)
Ortiz Cofer is quite clear and accessible, although students
have questions about who she is and why she uses Spanish.
I present the students something from my own cultural
background, with allusions to Mexican history and culture.
Then I ask them to jot down what has been said. We compare
the results, finding that those who do not share the background
will choose different elements out of the material than those
who come from a background similar to my own. We discuss
the function of ethnic identification through shared allusions
about the drawing of the ethnic circle around some readers,
while excluding others, even when the latter can understand
the words.
Students respond to the theme of the abandoned female,
which often results in discussions of the single-parent family.
Issues
The theme of male absence and women who wait is perhaps
the major one touched on here. Also, there is the historical
theme of Puerto Ricans and other minorities in the military as
a way of life that both gives them mobility yet divides their
families.
The colonization of Puerto Rico by the U.S. and the
division of its population into island and mainland groups are
reflected in the division of the family. The bilingual child is
another result of the confluence of these two nations, reflected
in the preoccupation with which of the languages authority
will accept from would-be participants.
This is confessional poetry, but with a twist. The author walks
a fine line between writing for her own group and writing for
the general audience. Thus she introduces Spanish and some
culture items from the island, but recontextualizes them into
English and U.S. culture. The style becomes an intercultural
hybrid.
Original Audience
There is the Puerto Rican audience that will bring to the poems
a specific knowledge of cultural elements that they share with
the poet. This audience will place the poem in a wider catalog
of cultural references. The non–Puerto Rican audience must
draw only from the information given, and will perhaps apply
the situations to universal myths or archetypes.
You can compare her well to many other women writers,
especially in the sense of women alone in a male world. For
example, “Claims” can be read with Lorna Dee Cervantes’s
“Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway.”
1. I ask them to consider what is the function of ethnic
writing. How does it work for insiders as compared to
outsiders? They should try to determine at what point
ethnic writing becomes incomprehensible to outsiders,
and what it means to open it to readers beyond the ethnic
circle.
2. Write on the theme of the distant patriarch in U.S.
contemporary life.
3. Write on the pros and cons of foreign language in
literature. The “God” of “Latin Women Pray” can be
taken as a metaphor for the U.S. reading public.
Bibliography
Acosta-Belen, Edna. “The Literature of the Puerto Rican
National Minority
in the United States.” The
Bilingual Review 5:1–2 (Jan.–Aug. 1978):
107–
16.
Tato Laviera (b. 1951)
Give handouts or glossaries that explain local references and
Spanish words; also it might be helpful to try to translate
Spanish phrases and words, in order to show the unique value
of bilingualism within Laviera’s poetry, and the fact that most
of it is untranslatable.
It would be wonderful to recite Laviera’s poems aloud
and to intro-duce them to the students as such, as oral poetry.
One might also relate his poetry to the tradition of rapping in
New York City. Again, students need to clarify references to
Puerto Rico and El Barrio with which they might be
unfamiliar. They respond to issues of bilingual education,
social criticism, and language (Spanish in the United States).
Discussions on how Anglo monolingual students feel when
reading Hispanic bilingual poetry such as Tato Laviera’s and
Hernández Cruz’s texts can lead to fruitful observations on
patterns of exclusion and marginalization in the United States
via language and linguistic policies.
Issues
Major themes are tension between Puerto Rican and
Nuyorican societies and identity; language and bilingualism as
ethnic identity markers; life in El Barrio; music and popular
culture; denouncement of social institutions such as schools,
Puerto Rican and U.S. governments, the Catholic church, etc.;
major context of the history of Puerto Rican immigration to
the U.S. and Operation Bootstrap in the 1940s and 1950s;
presence of African-Caribbean and African-American cultures.
Laviera’s poetry best exemplifies the new genre of bilingual
poetry in the United States. Discuss historical context of
bilingual literature in other countries, aesthetic innovation
within contemporary literature, political stance, use of oral
speech and traditions versus written, academic, and intellectual
poetry; relate to Mexican-American poets, and to AfricanAmerican poets of the 1960s and discuss the common space
between the black poets and Laviera’s work regarding the
reaffirmation of the African heritage for both communities.
How do they differ and what do they have in common?
Original Audience
This is poetry meant to be sung and recited. Originally
addressed to the Puerto Rican community in New York and
presented in the Nuyorican Café, it is poetry for the masses.
Study questions for Laviera would try to help students
contextualize his poetry both historically and aesthetically. For
example:
1. How would you describe El Barrio in New York? How
does Laviera present it in his poems?
2. After reading Laviera’s poems, how would you define
poetry? What kind of language is appropriate for poetry?
Would Laviera’s work fit into your definition?
A good and challenging writing assignment is to ask
students to write their own bilingual poem (using any other
language they may know). Discuss problems and effects.
Paper topics would include textual analysis of one
poem; a discussion of the functions of language and
bilingualism, and its problems; language and ethnic identity;
the functions of humor and irony.
Bibliography
Juan Flores, John Attinasi, and Pedro Pedraza, Jr., “La Carreta
Made a U-Turn: Puerto Rican Language and Culture in the
United States,” Daedalus 110: 2 (Spring, 1981): 193–217;
Wolfgang Binder, “Celebrating Life: The AmeRícan Poet Tato
Laviera,” Introduction to AmeRícan by Tato Laviera, 1985, 5–
10; Juan Flores, “Keys to Tato Laviera,” Introduction to
Enclave by Tato Laviera, 1985, 5–7; Frances Aparicio, “La
vida es un spanglish disparatero: Bilingualism in Nuyorican
Poetry,” European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the
United States, ed. Genvieve Fabre, 1988, 147–60.
Helena María Viramontes (b. 1954)
The story touches on so many social issues that class
discussion is almost assured. Some students, however, may
express a sense of overkill: too many social and political ills
too rapidly referenced to produce a profound impression. The
class may also divide over the issues, some finding that they
are so often covered by the media that they hardly need
repetition, while others like the story because it seems like a
familiar exposé on subjects they consider everyday reality.
You may find yourself in a discussion more of the
headnote and its advocacy of the rights of undocumented
aliens than of the story itself. I would try to focus on close
textual reading to prevent the discussion from drifting away
from the text and into arguments over social and political
policies. Yet, some explanation of U.S. immigration policies
and the political issues in Central America may be necessary
(see “Historical Perspectives”).
Issues
Viramontes has published few stories and the headnote
provides ample information on her themes and the personal
connection with them. Historically, however, students may
need more help. The Latino characters are undocumented
aliens, and as such they can be detained by Immigration and
Naturalization agents. After a hearing, they can be repatriated
to their country of origin. However, in the recent past the
process for Central Americans has more often than not tended
to allow delay of their return, especially for those who claim
political asylum. For Mexican aliens, the process is usually
more automatic, although their return to the U.S. is also quite
usual. The headnote suggests that the female refugee comes
from El Salvador, which may provoke some confusion, since
in the story her son is accused of collaborations with
“Contras,” a right wing terrorist group supported by the U.S.
in the 1980s to undermine the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
This could lead to ambiguous interpretations (just who has
killed the woman’s son, the Nicaraguan left or the Salvadorean
right?) that can be used to lend the story interesting ambiguity
to undermine simplistic political positions of right and wrong.
Narrative perspective varies, moving from one character to
another. While the technique may disorient some students,
most will have encountered it in previous studies. It is
important for them to note how Viramontes changes diction
levels to achieve characterization. The use of interior
monologue, especially in Section II, is noteworthy but not
difficult to comprehend. The dashes of the “Rashamon”
technique—the viewing of the same event from different
perspectives at different times—adds to the text’s fragmented
feel.
Original Audience
Viramontes addresses a contemporary U.S. audience with
topics relatively well known to most readers.
Comparisons can be made with Rolando Hinojosa’s selection,
which also utilizes the fragmented narrative while the subtlety
of Hinojosa’s social commentary can be contrasted with
Viramontes’s blatant approach. One might also place
Viramontes in the tradition of such writers as Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, or Upton Sinclair,
writers who did not shy away from explicit advocacy of
political positions, even at the risk of melodramatic excess.
While the headnote refers to García Márquez and Isabel
Allende, there is little of the Latin American Magical Realism
associated with those authors; the connection would be to their
political positions, not to their style.
1. The basic assignment here is to establish how the story
is being narrated: From whose perspective is something
seen? Then I ask students to characterize the different
perspectives by picking specific words, turns of phrases,
motifs, and so on.
2. I ask students to identify the specific Latino content of
the story. Then I ask them to consider if the experiences
apply to other immigrant groups, or the human condition
in general.
3. This story lends itself to creative writing assignments.
Have students pick a recent news event and narrate it
from the objective perspective of a reporter and then
from at least two others; for example, a witness of and a
participant in the event.
Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940)
Contributing Editor: Roshni Rustomji-Kerns
It is important to read and discuss Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s
Story” as an integral part of twentieth-century American
literature and not as an “exotic” short story by a foreign writer.
As the essay accompanying “A Wife’s Story” points out,
Mukherjee identifies herself very strongly as an American
writer writing about twentieth-century Americans. Although
most of her stories are about South Asian Americans (South
Asia in the contemporary geopolitical arena usually consists of
Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldive
Islands), she sees herself as being primarily influenced by, as
well as being part of, the tradition of Euro-American writers.
In a brief interview published in the November, 1993 issue of
San Francisco Focus in which she discusses her novel, The
Holder of the World, she says, “I think of myself as an
American writer . . . I want to focus on the making of the
American mind.” But instead of an exploration of the making
of the American mind, The Holder of the World is a reflection
and an echoing of the existing, dominant American attitudes
and concepts about the American colonial period and the
“exotic” India of the past with self-indulgent emperors and
rajas, wealthy merchants and self-sacrificing women.
In order to avoid the trap of reading “A Wife’s Story” as
being from a “marginal” group, I have found it best to first
discuss the crafting of the story as a literary work in the
tradition of English/American literature, and then move on to
the aspects of the story that deal with specific concepts and
cultures.
Keeping in mind Mukherjee’s own comments on racism,
multiculturalism, and literary influences, it is interesting to
discuss how she uses, or does not use, her ideas on these
subjects in “A Wife’s Story.” A classroom discussion on the
students’ views regarding these concepts helps them
understand the importance of these concepts in American
literature.
I have found the following assignments/approaches helpful:
1. Discuss the story as a literary work.
2. Read stories and poems by other American writers who
deal with the American expatriate/immigrant experience
and compare/contrast “A Wife’s Story” with the other
readings. The bibliography that follows includes some
collections of immigrant/expatriate writings.
3. Gain some knowledge of the history of Asian
Americans, especially within the context of the different
patterns of immigration in the U.S.
4. I have sometimes asked students to interview expatriates
of immigrants from South Asia on the campus or in their
community and see how Mukherjee’s story and her
distinctive literary style differ from, expand upon,
imitate, or use the style and subject matter of the oral
history/interviews conducted by the students. This is
often a suitable time to discuss, compare, and contrast
the styles and techniques of oral and written literature.
5. I have sometimes invited South Asian women from the
community to speak to us of their experiences in the
United States with an emphasis on how they would
communicate their experiences to a larger audience. For
example, we ask the guest speakers about the kinds of
stories they would like to write for a book or for a TV
show that deals with South Asian Americans.
6. Interestingly, after having read the works of South
Asian–American writers, many students have explored
the immigrant histories of their own families and have
then written stories, poems, essays, and screen/TV
scripts based on their projects.
Further discussions of the story, especially on specific issues
related to Mukherjee’s major themes and the literary
influences that emerge out of her root culture, may be based on
the statements made in the following parts of this Instructor’s
Guide essay.
Issues
Mukherjee’s earlier works dealt mainly with encounters
between cultures that take place when her South Asian–
American protagonists who live in Canada or the U.S. return
as visitors to their home in India (Tiger’s Daughter and Days
and Nights in Calcutta). Her later, and maybe more important
works, deal with these encounters as they take place in
America. The protagonists in her later works are not all from
South Asia, but nearly all of them are people who have arrived
in America during this century.
Her 1993 novel, The Holder of the World, takes place in
the United States as well as in India. It also takes place across
historical time. The framework of the novel takes place in
contemporary United States and India. The central story takes
place in seventeenth-century America and India. The EuroAmerican woman protagonists of this work have lovers who
are from other cultures or countries.
Her 1997 novel, Leave It to Me, takes the reader from
Asia to the United States, from the San Francisco of the 1960s
to the San Francisco of the 1990s. It is a fiercely independent
novel which shows Mukherjee’s grasp of the landscapes and
cultures of the late-twentieth-century “globalization” of
California and Asia.
A significant number of her stories and novels present
the encounters between cultures in the context of encounters
between women and men either of different root cultures or
from the same root culture. Some of these very personal
encounters have the poignancy of underlying affection, some
of them range from gentle humor to an attempt at broad satire,
some are marred by stereotypical characters and events, while
others reveal the dangerous, violent side of such encounters.
“A Wife’s Story” is an excellent example of encounters
between cultures presented in a narrative of encounters
between women and men. It is a fascinating story because it
presents the surprise of role reversal and because of the sense
of a dramatic presentation that permeates the story. It is the
wife, not the husband, who has come to America and who is
knowledgeable about this new home. Panna is the guide and
often the protector for her husband who is visiting her. And
her story is constantly dramatic. It begins with her in a theatre
and every episode that follows is carefully situated in a stagelike setting with set actors.
The story also contains echoes of the memory and
nostalgia for the past that plays a significant role in the
writings of many South Asian Americans. This memory and
nostalgia for the landscape of places and people of the writers’
childhood is often juxtaposed with the excitement and
challenges of their new life and the unfamiliar landscape of the
people and places of the U.S. It is interesting to explore how
Mukherjee uses these two strands in this story, bringing one or
the other—memory or the excitement of novelty—into the
foreground to present her characters and to build the circular,
winding pattern of her story.
Much as Mukherjee seems to insist that she belongs to the
Euro-American traditions of American literature and as easily
as she is able to be fit into that tradition, there are aspects of
her work that are derived mainly from her cultural roots in
India. She has spoken of the important influences in her life of
the images and ideas of her childhood in India and the sounds
and sights of the great traditions of Indian mythology and
literature. Her awareness of these influences enriches her
stories and novels. For example, she can give the impression
of a larger work even in a short story such as “A Wife’s
Story,” which carefully meanders from one place to another
and in which stories live within other stories. This technique of
winding stories and embedding stories within stories
dominates the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, and much of Indian literature.
Her ability to let us hear her characters speak to us not
only about themselves but as narrators of others’ experiences
is a reflection of the oral traditions of Indian literature. In “A
Wife’s Story,” we can hear Panna telling us not only the many
stories of her life in India and in New York but also the stories
of the people she introduces to us.
Bharati Mukherjee is an enthusiastic and extremely
knowledgeable collector of Indian miniatures. Keeping in
mind this interest in miniatures, we see that Mukherjee can
also paint small-scale yet detailed episodes and characters.
Mukherjee’s careful manipulation of moods and
emotional tones in her stories may be influenced by classical
Indian literature, art, and music. In Indian classical art, the
universally recognizable essence of an emotion or a mood
often dominates the work of art. In “A Wife’s Story,”
Mukherjee portrays Panna through her emotions and moods
that move from anger and outrage to perplexity and frustration,
to humor and affection, and in the end to the joy of selfdiscovery of her body and her sense of freedom. Even the
memory of old customs, and the excitement of new discoveries
for both Panna and her husband are presented in terms of
emotions and moods.
Bibliography
Collections that contain South Asian–American writings:
A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature.
Toronto: South
Asia Review, 1985.
Aziz, Nurjehan, ed. Her Mother’s Ashes and Other Stories;
Vol I, 1994;
Vol. II, 1999.
Gillan, M. M., and J. Gillan, eds. Growing Up Ethnic in
America, 1999.
Katrak, Ketu H., and R. Radhakrishna, eds. The Massachusetts
Review.
Desh-Videsh: South Asian Expatriate Writing
and Art 29.4 (Winter
1988–1989).
Maira, Sunaina, and Srikant Rajini, eds. Contours of the
Heart: South
Asians Map North America, 1997.
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian
American
Women by Asian Women United of
California, 1989.
Mukherjee, Bharati, and Ranu Vanikar, eds. The Literary
Review: Writers
of the Indian Commonwealth 29.4
(Summer 1986).
Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora
by Women of
South Asian Descent Collective,
1993.
Rustomji, Roshni, ed. Journal of South Asian Literature:
South Asian
Women Writers. The Immigrant Experience
21.2 (Winter–Spring
1986).
Rustomji-Kerns, ed. Living in America: Poetry and Fiction by
South Asian
American Writers, 1995.
South Asians in America:
Agarwal, Priya. Passage from India: Post-1965 Immigrants
and Their
Children, 1991.
Bahari, Deepika, and Vasudeva, Mary, eds. Between the Lines:
South
Asians and Postcoloniality, 1991.
Fisher, Maxine P. The Indians of New York City, 1980.
Jensen, Joan M. Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants
in North
America, 1988.
Saran, Parmatma. The Asian Indian Experience in the United
States, 1985.
Singh, Jane. South Asians in America: An Annotated Selected
Biography,
1988.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History
of Asian
Americans, 1989.
———. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural
America, 1993.
Anthologies of cross-cultural and multicultural writings:
Brown, Wesley, and Amy Ling, eds. Imagining America:
Stories from the
Promised Land, 1991.
Divakaruni, Chitra B. Multitude: Cross Cultural Readings for
Writers,
1993.
Hongo, Garrett. The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America,
1993.
Rustomji-Kerns, Rashni (with Rajini Srikanth and Lenny
Strobel).
Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the
Americas, 1999.
Shankar, Lavina Dhingra, and Srikanth, Rajini, eds. A Part,
Yet Apart:
South Asians in Asian America, 1998.
Verburg, Carol J. Ourselves among Others: Cross Cultural
Readings for
Writers, 1991.
Watanabe, Sylvia, and Carol Bruchac. Home to Stay: Asian
American
Women’s Fiction, 1990.
Gary Soto (b. 1952)
As a Chicano working-class poet, Soto sometimes uses
figurative language that might be unfamiliar to and difficult for
some readers. Occasionally, he uses a Spanish word or phrase.
As a poet with a strong sense of kinship with people who are
poor, neglected, and oppressed, Soto tries to create poetry out
of ordinary working-class experience and images. All this is
very different from typically bourgeois American poetry.
It is useful to connect Soto’s work to contemporary
events in Mexican-American experience. Reading a bit about
Cesar Chavez and the California farmworker struggle places
some of Soto’s sympathies in context. General reading in
Chicano (or Mexican-American) history would also be useful.
It is also useful to consider Soto among other contemporary
poets whose sensibilities were shaped by the post-1960s
struggles to improve the circumstances of minority groups and
the poor.
Urge students to try to see the world from the point of
view of one of Soto’s working-class Chicanos, perhaps a
farmworker. From this perspective, one sees things very
differently than from the point of view generally presented in
American writing. For the tired, underpaid farmworker, nature
is neither kind nor beautiful, as, for example, Thoreau would
have us believe. Soto writes about the choking dust in the
fields, the danger to the workers’ very existence that the sun
represents. Imagine a life without many creature comforts,
imagine feelings of hunger, imagine the pain of knowing that
for the affluent and comfortable, your life counts for very
little.
Students are generally moved by Soto’s vivid and honest
presentation of personal experiences, his sympathy for the
poor, and the accessibility of his work. They generally wish to
know more about Mexican American and Mexican cultures,
more about the plight of farmworkers and the urban poor.
Issues
Despite Soto’s distinctiveness, he is very much a
contemporary American poet. Like many of his peers, he
writes largely in an autobiographical or confessional mode. As
an intensively introspective poet, he seeks to maintain his
connection to his Mexican heritage as it exists on both sides of
the border. His work often focuses on the loss of a father at an
early age, on the difficulties of adolescence (especially
romantic feelings), and the urgency of family intimacy. On a
broader level, Soto speaks passionately on behalf of tolerance
and mutual respect while he denounces middle- and upperclass complacency and indifference to the poor.
Again, Soto is very much a contemporary American poet,
writing autobiographically in free verse and using images that
are drawn from ordinary experience and popular culture. His
sympathies for the poor are very typical of contemporary
writers from ethnic or underprivileged backgrounds. It is also
important to note that some of Soto’s poetry has been
influenced by the “magical realism” of modern Latin
American writing, especially Gabriel Garciá-Márquez.
Original Audience
Although Soto is a Chicano poet in that his Mexican-American
heritage is a key aspect of his literary sensibility, he
nevertheless aims for a wider audience. He clearly wants a
broad American audience to feel sympathies for his poetic
characters and their circumstances. The product of a
contemporary sensibility, Soto’s poetry is topical and vital.
Again, as an autobiographical poet, Soto can be compared with
such figures as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia
Plath. His working-class sensibility is reminiscent of James
Wright and Philip Levine (who was Soto’s teacher at
California State University, Fresno). His celebration of certain
Chicano values and denunciation of bigotry is comparable to
that of other Chicano poets such as Lorna Dee Cervantes.
1. Students might be asked to look for clues in his work as
to ethnic background, economic status, and geographical
setting.
Furthermore, they might be asked to consider certain
formal qualities of his work: Where do Soto’s images
and symbols come from? Does Soto attempt to make his
work accessible to ordinary readers?
2. Soto’s work is fruitfully compared to other
autobiographical poets (Lowell, Berryman, Plath) and to
working-class poets such as Wright and Levine.
Soto’s book The Tale of Sunlight (particularly in its
final section) might be studied for its elements of
“magical realism.”
Soto, of course, can be studied in connection to other
Chicano poets such as Lorna Dee Cervantes and Umar
Salinas.
Bibliography
Probably the most useful general source of information on
Soto (complete with various references) is the article on Soto
in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 82, “Chicano
Writers” (1989).
Joy Harjo (Creek) (b. 1951)
Contributing Editor: C. B. Clark
It’s important to make certain that the students read the
biographical notes and footnotes provided in the text. Consider
also using audiotapes of Harjo reading and discussing her own
work.
Issues
Imperialism, colonialism, dependency, nostalgia for the old
ways, reverence for grandparents and elders, resentment of
conditions of the present, plight of reservation and urban
Indians, natural world, sense of hopelessness, power of the
trickster, idea that the feminine is synonymous with heritage,
deadly compromise, symbol of all that has been lost (such as
the land), tension between the desire to retrieve the past and
the inevitability of change, the arrogance of white people,
problems of half-breeds (or mixed-bloods).
Harjo uses free verse. She is aware of classic European form,
but chooses not to use it. She does try oral chant, as in “She
Had Some Horses.” She is not in any school, except American
Indian.
Original Audience
Ask the question: Is there any audience outside American
Indians? The second audience is the student and the third is the
general reader.
1. Who are the Creeks? What is their origin? What impact
did removal have on the Five Civilized Tribes? Where
are the Creeks today? How are they organized? What
was the role of the Christian missionary? What is
traditional Creek religion? What is an urban Indian?
Does Harjo travel much and is that reflected in her
poetry?
2. Hand out a reading list, containing ethnographic,
historical, and con-temporary works on the Creeks.
Hand out a theme list, containing such items as removal,
acculturation, identity. Hand out a subject list containing
topics such as removal, alcoholism, and jails. Ask the
students to write an essay on each of the lists. Require
some library research for the essays, which will provide
background for the poetry.
Bibliography
There are no separate works on Harjo. Bits on her can be
found in critical pieces on her work, in collections, in
autobiographical pieces, and through interviews.
Published works that deal in part with her include
Joseph Bruchac’s Survival This Way and Andrew O. Wiget’s
Native American Literature, part of the Twayne series, as well
as Laura Coltelli, ed., Winged Words: American Indian
Writers Speak, and World Literature Today, Spring 1992.
Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) (b. 1954)
Contributing Editor: Andrew O. Wiget
One problem in teaching Love Medicine is the intensity of
religious experience, which many students in today’s secular
society may have difficulty relating to. Another is the
surrealistic imagery that Marie Lazarre uses in describing her
relationship with Sister Leopolda. And yet a third is
understanding the historical and cultural context of reservation
life at this period of time in the 1930s.
In terms of the historical and cultural context, I would
point out to students that Indian reservations in the 1930s were
notorious for their poverty, their high mortality rate, their
chronic unemployment, and the destruction of the fabric of
Native American social and cultural forms. One of the
principal policies of the United States government was to
transform Native Americans into carbon copies of AngloAmericans, and one of the principal ways that they hoped to
accomplish this, ever since the Grant administration in the
1870s, was through religion.
During the 1870s, the Native American communities
were allocated among the various major Christian sects, and
missionary activity was understood to be an agent of social
and cultural transformation. The objective was to get rid of the
Indian while saving the man. Culture was imagined as a
number of practices and behaviors and customs, which—if
they could be changed—would eliminate all the historic
obstacles to the Indians’ participation in Anglo-American
culture. Of course, if they were eliminated, so would the
Indian nest be eliminated. Religion then is hardly a simple
spiritual force, but an agent of the interests of the EuroAmerican majority. Such an understanding, I think, should
help students appreciate the intensity with which Marie and
Sister Leopolda enter their confrontation.
A fine introduction to this story would be to spend a
good deal of time focusing on the first paragraph, trying to
understand the tone of the narrator and also the structure of her
vision of herself, which she repeats later in the story. I would
use the imagery and the tone as a way of developing the
narrator’s sense of herself, and I would try to account for her
intense antagonism to the “black robe women on the hill.”
Most students are puzzled by the intensity of the
antagonism, and they have real questions as to whether or not
Marie or Leopolda or both are crazy. Students tend to think
that they’re crazy because of the surrealistic imagery and
because of the intensity of the emotion, which strikes most of
them as excessive. Students need to realize that religion,
especially when it is the lens through which other issues are
magnified, can become the focus of such intense feelings, and
that when one’s feelings are so intense, they frequently compel
the creation of surrealistic imagery as the only means to
adequately shape what one sees.
Issues
I think that there are two major themes that could be addressed
in this story. The first is to understand religion, as described in
the previous question, as a field upon which two different sets
of interests contest their right to define the terms by which
people will understand themselves and others. For all the black
comedy in this story, the battle that Leopolda fights with the
Dark One over the soul of Marie Lazarre is understood by both
Leopolda and Marie as a very real battle. Leopolda represents
a set of values, and so does the Dark One. Marie is understood
as struggling to choose between the values of the Dark One
and the values of Sister Leopolda, and these values are cultural
as well as spiritual, for it is precisely the Indian character of
Marie—her pride, her resistance to change, her imagination—
that Leopolda identifies with the Dark One.
A second theme is to view the formation of identity in
bicultural environments as an enriching, rather than an
impoverishing, experience. Too often in bicultural situations,
Indian protagonists are represented as being helpless,
suspended in their inability to make a decision between two
sets of values offered to them. The John Joseph Mathews
novel Sundown is an example. In this story, however, Marie
Lazarre chooses, and she chooses to identify herself as an
Indian over and against the black robe sisters precisely by
turning their own naiveté against them. The “veils of faith”
that she refers to early in this story not only prevent the sisters
from seeing the truth, but they also obscure their faith from
shining forth, like the Reverend Mr. Hooper’s veil in
Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil.”
This story succeeds principally as a study of characterization. I
would ask students to pay special attention to matters of tone
and point of view. Since this story is told in the first person, I
would ask them, on the basis of what they have read, to form
an opinion of Marie Lazarre and, secondly, to develop some
sense of her judgment of Sister Leopolda. I would ask them to
look especially at the imagery and the language that Marie
uses to describe her encounters with Leopolda and to describe
herself, as the basis for their opinions.
Original Audience
The audience for whom this story is written is contemporary,
but differs from the students we meet in university settings by
perhaps being older and therefore more familiar with a
traditional religiosity. Students who are not Catholic may need
to know something about Catholicism, especially the role of
nuns, and this historic role of missionaries in relationship to
Indian communities. Other explicitly Catholic references, such
as to the stigmata, are explained by their context in the story.
This story can be usefully contrasted with some of Flannery
O’Connor’s stories, which focus on the discovery of real faith,
especially from a Catholic perspective. The emphasis on
surrealistic imagery provides interesting connections with
poems like those of Adrienne Rich; since this is a retrospective
narrative, one might usefully compare this probing of a
formative event from the narrator’s past with Rich’s poem
“Diving into the Wreck.” Insofar as this offers us a sensitive
and imaginative teenage minority narrator, the story invites
comparisons with the work of Toni Morrison and Alice
Walker. In Native American terms, useful comparisons would
be to Gertrude Bonnin’s “Why I Am a Pagan,” as well as John
Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo.”
1. I’ve never used questions ahead of time for this
particular story, though if I did, I think they would be
addressed to issues of characterization and tone.
2. An interesting assignment, because this story is told
from Marie’s point of view, is to retell the encounter
between Marie and Sister Leopolda from Sister
Leopolda’s perspective. This would require students to
formulate characterizations of Leopolda and of Marie,
which would be useful touchstones for evaluating their
comprehension of the issues on which the conflict in this
story rests.
Bibliography
Erdrich, Louise. “Whatever Is Really Yours: An Interview
with Louise
Erdrich.” Survival This Way: An Interview
with American Indian
Poets. Tucson: University of
Arizona, 1987, 73–86.
Wiget, Andrew. “Singing the Indian Blues: Louise Erdrich and
the Love that
Hurts So Good.” Puerto del Sol 21.2
(1986): 166–75.
Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
Contributing Editor: Paul Jones
Carver has been quoted as saying that his stories could happen
anywhere. That is pretty much true. Additionally, they are so
contemporary that they require almost no background material
or preparation for reading and understanding by an American
audience. Even the issues of class (most of Carver’s
characters, if they have jobs, are marginally employed),
although they do exist in Carver stories, are not too heavily at
play in “A Small, Good Thing.” However, this lack of
location, class, and even time can be used to start a classroom
discussion. You might ask: Where is this story set and in what
year? How old are the characters? How does this affect your
reading of the story? Does this lack diminish the story? Would
it have been a better story if we knew it had been set in, say,
Cleveland in May 1978? How would this story be read by
readers outside of Carver’s culture? Would it be understood
differently in France or in Cameroon? The questions can draw
the class toward a discussion of style in literature and to one of
the major issues for Carver: What constitutes a good story?
To bring Carver himself into the classroom, I
recommend the Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory interview
found in Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction or in
Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the
1980s as sources for rich Carver quotes and his own insights
into the stories and the writing process. For example, Carver
cites Isaac Babel’s dictum, “No iron can pierce the heart with
such force as a period put in just the right place,” as one of his
own guiding principles.
Issues
In many of Carver’s stories, the issues of loss and of
alcoholism are a part of the larger issue, which is the isolation
and terror of people when a total breakdown of survival
systems is at hand. The near-inarticulateness of his characters
in the face of this terror and loss is significant and has been a
major point of contention among his critics. Some say that
Carver’s characters are too ordinary, underperceptive, and
despairing to experience the philosophical questions of
meaning into which they have been thrust. His defenders say
that Carver characters demonstrate that people living marginal,
routine lives can come close to experiencing insight and
epiphany under pressure of intruding mysteries, such as the
death of a loved one.
You would definitely want to talk about “minimalism” in
fiction. The style has become so pervasive that students may
just assume that this pared-down method of storytelling is
simply how one writes fiction. Frederick Barthelme writes that
as a minimalist “you’re leaving room for the readers, at least
for the ones who like to use their imaginations.” John Barth
counters with this definition of a minimalist aesthetic: “[its]
cardinal principle is that artistic effect may be enhanced by a
radical economy of artistic means, even where such parsimony
compromises other values: completeness, for example, or
richness or precision of statement.” Carver was at first the
most influential practitioner of minimalism, and then, through
the rewriting of his earlier stories, a writer who repudiated the
style.
Luckily, Carver’s stories can be used to show both the
power of the so-called minimalist approach and its limits.
Have the students first read the brief (ten-page) story “The
Bath,” which was the earlier version of “A Small, Good
Thing.” “The Bath” is an excellent example of what
minimalism does well and can be more terrifying and
unsettling than anything by Stephen King. Contrasting and
comparing “The Bath” and “A Small, Good Thing” from
Carver’s later, more expansive period will allow the students
to participate in the intense debate about style. Carver
preferred the second version, but he didn’t pass judgment on
those who like “The Bath” best.
Another useful approach for showing the nuances of
revision at work in Carver’s writing is to look at a few other
versions of his stories. A particularly illustrative case is a
short-short-story of under five hundred words that has been
known as “Mine” (Furious Seasons), “Popular Mechanics”
(What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), and “Little
Things” (Where I’m Calling From). The last two differ only in
title, but there are significant differences in “Mine.” Students
need not be textual critics to talk about the choices that Carver
has made in the various versions of his stories.
Finally, students can be asked to consider the effect of
translating Carver’s story into film narrative by watching the
relevant portion of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.
Original Audience
Carver’s stories were published in most of the important slick
magazines of the seventies and eighties including Esquire and
The New Yorker. All along the way his work also appeared in
small literary magazines. David Bellamy called Carver “the
most influential stylist since Donald Barthelme.” He was
writing for writers, for those who appreciated experimental
literature as well as for a general, though sophisticated, reading
audience.
Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are the
obvious influences on Carver’s work. The seemingly simple
pared-down style of writing follows straight through to Carver.
You might consider teaching Carver and Hemingway and
perhaps Donald Barthelme together, then entering into a
discussion of the bare bones style of each.
Another way to consider Carver’s style is to remember
that he began writing poetry before he tried fiction and
continued writing and publishing poetry throughout his career.
He said (in a Paris Review interview with Mona Simpson), “In
magazines, I always turned to poems first before I read the
stories. Finally, I had to make a choice, and I came down on
the side of fiction. It was the right choice for me.” Carver’s
poetry has been compared to that of William Carlos Williams,
although I see many obvious differences in their approach,
sense of the line, and sense of narrative. His poetry can also be
compared to that of James Wright, particularly with respect to
the class of people from which the poems and stories are
drawn.
Bibliography
The following collections by Carver include stories mentioned
above:
“Mine.” In Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara:
Capra Press,
1977.
“Little Things.” In Where I’m Calling from: New and Selected
Stories. New
York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
“Popular Mechanics” and “The Bath.” In What We Talk About
When We
Talk About Love. New York: Vintage Books,
1982.
Critical books on Carver are as follows:
Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short
Fiction. New
York: Twayne, 1992.
Runyon, Randolph. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1992.
Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1988.
Carver talks about his writing and the writing of others in the
following books:
Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York:
Vintage
Books, 1984.
Gentry, Marshall Bruce and William L. Stull. Conversations
with Raymond
Carver. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1990.
The following book of photographs helps show the locations
for several of Carver’s stories:
Adelman, Bob. Carver Country: The World of Raymond
Carver. “Introduction” by Tess Gallagher. New
York: Scribner, 1990.
I find it always helpful to hear the author read his stories,
which is especially true in the case of Carver, although only
the following early tape is available:
Ray Carver Reads Three Short Stories. Columbia: American
Audio Prose
Library, 1983.
“A Small, Good Thing” can be found on tape (but not read by
Carver) in the following:
Where I’m Calling From. Read by Peter Riegert. New York:
Random House
Audio Publishers, 1989.
Wendy Rose (Hopi) (b. 1948)
Contributing Editor: C. B. Clark
Background knowledge about Indian culture and history will
help students pick up on comments about imperialism,
removals, atrocities, resentments, etc.
Issues
Themes are colonialism, imperialism, dependency, nostalgia
for the old ways, reverence for grandparents, resentment for
conditions of the present, plight of reservation and urban
Indians, sense of hopelessness, the power of the trickster,
feminism as synonymous with heritage, deadly compromise,
symbolism of all that has been lost (such as land), tension
between the desire to retrieve the past and the inevitability of
change, arrogance of white people, problems of half-breeds (or
mixed-bloods).
Rose uses free verse. She is aware of classical European form
but chooses not to use it. In addition, she is less an oral poet
using chants and more of a lyric poet. She is not in any school,
except American Indian.
Original Audience
I ask this question: Is there an audience outside American
Indians? A second audience, of course, would be the students
in class. A third audience would be the general reader.
1. What are the major themes of Hopi religion? Who are
the Hopi? Where do they live? Why do they lie atop
mesas? Where do the Hopi claim to come from? What
contemporary problems do they face? Who are some
Hopi leaders today? How do the Hopi view the world?
2. Hand out a reading list on the Hopi, containing
ethnographic, his-torical, and contemporary works.
Hand out a theme list, containing topics like manifest
destiny or acculturation. Hand out a subject list, with
subjects like alcoholism, jails, and kachinas. Then, ask
students to write an essay using Rose’s works in
reference to any of these topics.
Bibliography
No single biographical or critical work exists on Rose.
Information must be gleaned from critical pieces, collections,
and book reviews. Additionally, information can come from
autobiographical statements preceding selections printed in
anthologies of American Indian works.
Rose is included in Joseph Bruchac’s Survival This Way,
Swann and Krupat’s I Tell You Now, Andrew Wiget’s Native
American Literature, and Winged Words: American Indian
Writers Speak, edited by Laura Coltelli.
Wilson, David Babe. “Review of Bone Dance.”
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 18 (1994):
274–78.
Rita Dove (b. 1952)
Contributing Editor: Hilary Holladay
In my experience, students like Dove’s poems, even though
they don’t fully understand them. I found that dividing the
class into small groups (and providing them with several
discussion questions) works well with her poems. This gives
students a chance to raise issues they might not air
otherwise—and accommodates poems that seem to be more
about asking questions than answering them. Walking from
group to group, I am able to address specific concerns without
usurping control of a free-flowing discussion.
Issues
In her poems, Dove often distills the experiences of oppressed
groups: women, blacks, and working-class Americans, among
others. She does not strike a victim’s pose, however. Whether
she is dealing with contemporary scenes or historical events,
she speaks with the calm confidence of one who knows she
will be listened to.
As an African-American woman who has spent virtually
her entire adult life affiliated with one university or another,
she represents an intriguing mix of “outsider” and “insider”
perspectives. The academic life seems to have provided her
with a forum quite compatible with her interest in the
intersections of the personal, the political, and the intellectual.
As an American who believes strongly in the value of
traveling to other countries and learning other languages, Dove
brings an international perspective to many of her poems as
well.
Dove has published several prose books and a verse drama, but
she seems most at home in lyric poetry. Although the prose
poem published here is a departure from her usual style, it is
characteristic of Dove’s interest in obliquely stated narratives.
Thomas and Beulah, a narrative sequence, is hardly
straightforward in its development; in that Pulitzer Prize–
winning collection, Dove provides the pieces with which we
can envision (and continually reenvision) the evolving puzzle
of two interwoven lives. Something similar occurs in her
sonnet sequence based on the Persephone myth, Mother Love
(1995).
Dove can be grouped with other African-American poets,
women poets, and poets exemplary for their use of imagery.
Because of her German and Scandinavian influences, her
poems would also work well in a comparative literature
course.
1. Study questions for the Dove poems selected here might
focus on voice and perspective, characterization, and
rhetorical strategies. For example, how would you
describe the speaker in each of these poems? What is the
speaker’s perspective on the events described in each
poem? How does the mood differ from poem to poem?
How does “Kentucky, 1833” blend the historical with
the personal? What are the paradoxes at work in this
poem? How is the poem’s form significant? How would
you paraphrase “Ö”? Can you think of other words, in
English or other languages, that change “the whole
neighborhood”? Explain your selections. What do you
think the speaker in “Arrow” means by “the language of
fathers”? What is the significance of the enjambment
and the three-line stanzas in “The Oriental Ballerina”?
2. Students writing about Dove’s poems should read all (or
at least a couple) of her poetry collections so they will
have a sense of the breadth of her concerns. Their papers
could address family relationships, narrative perspective,
or her enigmatic image patterns. They could also explore
her international themes or compare one or more of her
poems about family life with those of another woman
poet—such as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, or Lucille
Clifton. An alternative assignment: Write a letter to
Dove and present her with a possible interpretation of
one of her poems. Then pose several questions that
would help you develop your interpretation and perhaps
help you better understand her other poems as well. This
latter assignment worked well in an advanced
composition class, because it enabled students to
develop their skills in writing query letters as well as
analyzing poetry.
Bibliography
Numerous interviews with Dove have been published since her
tenure as poet laureate. See, for example, Malin Pereira’s
interview with her in Contemporary Literature 40.2 (Summer
1999): 182–213. Here, Dove discusses her verse drama, The
Darker Face of the Earth, and comments on the Black Arts
Movement as well as the relation between “national” history
and her personal experience as a black woman. Another good
resource is the journal Callaloo, which has published a number
of essays on Dove; the Winter 1996 issue, for instance,
contains several articles on her sonnet sequence, Mother Love.
In addition to a recent surge of journal essays and book
chapters on Dove’s writing, a new study looks at the whole of
Dove’s work: Therese Steffen’s Crossing Color: Transcultural
Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama
(2000).
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957)
Contributing Editor: Zhou Xiaojing
In discussing Li-Young Lee’s poems it is important to avoid
tendencies toward ethnocentric and Eurocentric readings.
Some readers tend to overemphasize the “Chinese sensibility”
in Lee’s poems without acknowledging the influence of
biblical writings and Western literature on Lee’s work; others
tend to judge Lee’s poems as “sentimental,” without placing
them within the context of his family history and personal
experience as a refugee and immigrant. Students will better
understand the importance of family, especially of Lee’s
father, in his poems when provided with some specific
biographical information.
In her discussion of Li-Young Lee’s poems, Judith
Kitchen says that though “the story is personal and unique, the
poems are declamatory, public even in their intimacy”
(“Auditory Imagination” 161). Such a stance of the “lyric I” in
Lee’s poetry would be a good starting point for classroom
discussions. Some critics argue that the authoritative and
transcendental “lyric I” is inaccessible to Asian-American
poets. Others regard the utterances of the “lyric I” as an
outdated mode of Romantic lyric poetry. Indeed, many
contemporary poets such as the New York School poets,
Language poets, and some Asian-American poets, are resisting
the Romantic “lyric I.” It might be interesting to compare
Lee’s speaking “I” with that in poems of Wordsworth, of the
American “confessional” poets, of John Asbery, Charles
Olson, Gary Snyder, and other Asian-American poets such as
Garrett Hongo and Cathy Song, as well as African, Latino, and
Native American poets. This comparison would yield more
insights when it is situated in the poets’ respective historical
and social contexts. Students may also be asked to consider the
relationship between the individual and the collective identities
for European Americans and minority Americans, and to
investigate the connections between identities and the status of
the “lyric I.”
Issues
The major themes in Lee’s poems, such as love, loss, exile, the
evanescence of life, human mortality, displacement and
disconnection, the necessity and violence of change, cultural
and racial identity, are in one way or another related to Lee’s
unique experience and to his bicultural heritage. These themes
develop over the years in depth and scope from his first book,
Rose, to his second, The City in Which I Love You, and
culminate in the last poem of his second volume, “The
Cleaving,” often considered his best and a sig-nificantly
“American” poem. Lee’s distinctive style and voice are also
markedly established in this poem, which can be read in
connection with the poems carved on the walls of barracks by
Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island and in the
context of racism and racial stereotypes in American history
and culture. Bret Harte’s poem “Plain Language from Truthful
James,” better known as “The Heathen Chinee” (1870), can be
used to contrast Lee’s representation of the Chinese in “The
Cleaving.” Discussions of Lee’s poem in connection with
Harte’s representational tactics in con-structing the
“Otherness” of the Chinese can yield some insights into the
notions and constructions of the American identity in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.
Lee’s prose-poem autobiography, The Winged Seed: A
Remembrance, is very informative of his family history, his
difficulty with the English language as a child, his search for
the possibilities of language as a poet, the connection of his
life to his father’s, and his understanding of “death in life,” all
of which underlie the subject matter of his poems.
Lee has developed a flexible strategy in employing imagery
for multiple functions. He often uses a central image to
organize and develop his ideas and feelings through free
association. His representations of images sometimes reflect
and enhance emotions (“I Ask My Mother to Sing”) and
sometimes visualize the felt quality of a particular reality
(“Persimmons”). While Lee’s use of imagery to express
feelings and perceptions may be influenced by classical
Chinese poetry, his strategy of employing the anecdotal
descriptive-narrative as a springboard to launch into the
emotional and abstract is characteristic of contemporary
American poetry.
But the down-to-earth, sometimes violent sensualness of
Lee’s images, and their unlikely metaphorical connections and
surprising transformations within a single poem, are
unmistakably the results of Lee’s innovative style. The
surrealistic quality in Lee’s style partly derives from French
surrealism, in which Lee discerns “a new interiority,” and
partly from Lao Zi and Chuang Zi, in whose writings Lee finds
freedom and sanity in the seemingly irrational.
Original Audience
Lee does not like to be confined by the label of “an AsianAmerican poet.” One of his goals as a poet is to “birth a new
and genuine . . . interiority into the world” (Li-Young Lee’s
letter to the author, May 1995). His poems, written in plain
speech and accessible style, appeal to a general audience. As
Lee writes in “With Ruins,” his poems offer a space “for those
who own no place/to correspond to ruins in the soul” (the City
in Which I Love You 45).
In his foreword to Rose, Gerald Stern has singled out one of
Lee’s differences from other contemporary American poets.
“The ‘father’ in contemporary poetry,” Stern notes, “tends to
be either a pathetic soul or a bungler or a sweet loser,
overwhelmed by the demands of family and culture and
workplace. . . . The father in Lee’s poems is nothing like that”
(9). It would be mutually illuminating to compare the father
figure in Lee’s poems with those in poems by Robert Lowell
(“Commander Lowell”), Anne Sexton (“All My Pretty Ones”),
Sylvia Plath (“Daddy”), and Cathy Song (“The Tower of
Pisa”) in relation to their cultural and historical contexts and in
terms of their specific personal situations.
A similar comparative approach can also be used in
discussing Lee’s treatment of love, death, and the body. Use,
for example, “The Song of Songs,” poems by John Donne,
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Dylan Thomas,
particularly his “The Force That through the Green Fuse
Drives the Flower” and “Fern Hill.”
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Lee, Li-Young. Rose. New York: BOA Editions, 1986.
———. The City in Which I Love You. New York: BOA,
1990.
———. The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. New York:
Simon & Schuster,
1996.
———. “The Father’s House.” Transforming Vision: Writers
on Art.
Selected and intro. Edward Hirsch. New York: A
Bulfinch Press
Book/Little Brown and Company,
1994, 119–20.
“Li-Young Lee.” Interview with Bill Moyers. The Language of
Life: A
Festival of Poets, Ed. James Haba. New York:
Doubleday, 1995,
257–69.
“Li-Young Lee’s Universal Mind—A Search for the Soul.”
Interview with
Eileen Tabios, including Tabios’s
comments and Lee’s draft of a new
poem, “The
Father’s House.” Black Lightning: Poetry-In-Progress.
By Eileen Tabios. Intro. Arthur Sze. New York: The Asian
American
Writers Workshop, 1998, 110–32.
“Li-Young Lee: Interview by James Kyung-Jin Lee,” Words
Matter:
Conversations with Asian American Writers, ed.
King-Kok Cheung,
2000.
Secondary Sources
Engles, Tim. “Lee’s ‘Persimmons.’ ” The Explicator 54.3
(Spring 1996):
191–92.
Hesford, Walter A. “The City in Which I Love You: Li-Young
Lee’s
Excellent Song.” Christianity and Literature 46.1
(Autumn 1996):
37–60.
Kitchen, Judith. Essay review of Rose by Li-Young Lee.
“Speaking
Passions.” Georgia Review 42.2 (Summer
1988): 419–22.
———. Essay review of The City in Which I Love You by LiYoung Lee.
“Auditory Imagination: The Sense of
Sound.” Georgia Review 45.1
(Spring 1991): 160–
63.
Stern, Gerald. Foreword. Rose by Li-Young Lee. New York:
BOA, 1986,
8–10.
Zhou, Xiaojing. “Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee’s
Poetry.”
MELUS 21.1 (Spring 1996): 113–32.
Lorna Dee Cervantes (b. 1954)
Students may object to the strident tone of “Poem for the
Young White Man.” Even Chicanos can get turned off by it.
The feminism has the same effect on the men. Why is she so
hostile toward males, they ask. Some now say that she is
passé, radicalism being a thing of the sixties. I prepare the
students with information on feminist issues, especially the
single-parent families, wife abuse, and child abuse. I also
prepare them by talking about racial and ethnic strife as a form
of warfare, seen as genocide by minority groups.
I use Bernice Zamora’s poetry as an introduction. Her
alienation from the male rituals in “Penitents” produces the allfemale family in “Be-neath. . . .” The sense of living in one’s
own land, but under other’s rules (Zamora’s “On Living in
Aztlán”), explains the bitterness of “Poem for the Young
White Man.” And both of the poets eventually find a solution
in their relation to nature through animal imagery; yet just like
Zamora in “Pico Blanco,” Cervantes maintains an uneasy
relationship with the macho world with which women still
contend.
Issues
The historical theme of the disappearance of the nuclear family
in the United States is primary here. There is also the effect of
urban renewal on ethnic and poor communities whose
neighborhoods were often the targets for projects that
dislodged people from an area. In “Crow” there is the theme of
finding a link in nature to counter urban alienation.
On the personal level, Cervantes’s family history is
reflected auto-biographically in “Beneath. . . .”
Cervantes uses the form of the narrative poem, with a few key
metaphors. Her confessional mode is reminiscent of Robert
Lowell’s. Her style is conversational, direct, unpretentious, but
there is a constant sharp edge to her verses, a menacing
warning against overstepping one’s welcome.
Original Audience
Although her audience was and is generally “third worldist”
and Chicano, these poems show a range of different target
audiences. “Beneath . . .” is a feminist poem, appealing greatly
to women. When it was first published, there was little
discussion of the issue of female heads of households in
Chicano circles because few wanted to admit to the problem in
the Chicano community. Now the discussion is much more
common.
“Poem for . . .” had great appeal in the closing days of
the radical movement, but has since faded to a smaller
audience of older Chicanos who have heard the radical poetry
to the point of exhaustion. However, mainstream liberals like
“Poem for . . .” because it speaks as they assume all minorities
should speak, harshly, bitterly, and violently. Young Chicanos
are once again picking up the strident tone, faced as they are
with the economic decline that has exacerbated social
problems, especially in urban schools.
I compare her to Margaret Atwood in their sense of women
being submerged and needing to surface by finding their own
traditions. They both have a capacity for stringent statement
when pushed by violent circumstances. Both have strong links
to nature, in which their ancestors cultivated, not only food,
but their culture. Comparisons with Bernice Zamora are
suggested above.
Carlos Castaneda’s theory of the enemy is significant for
Cervantes. It explains how the “Young White Man” is
tempting the author into violence.
1. Students are asked to consider the significance of
mainstream con-struction projects on local communities;
from here they are asked to ponder the cycle of change
and its victims.
2. Write on the links between “Beneath . . .” and “Poem
for. . . .”
3. Write on Cervantes’s view of the world as a threat to
existence and what she offers as a response.
Bibliography
The best article is my “Bernice Zamora and Lorna Dee
Cervantes,” Revista Iberoamericana 51, 132–33 (July–Dec.
1985): 565–73. See also Cordelia Candelaria’s Chicano Poetry
and Martin Sonchez’s Contemporary Chicana Poetry.
Aurora Levins Morales (b. 1954)
Since Levins Morales’s major book is authored in
collaboration with her mother, Rosario Morales, it would be
appropriate to present her work in this context. Instructors
could familiarize themselves with Getting Home Alive and
make a selection of texts in which the dialogue—as well as the
differences—between mother and daughter is exemplified.
Issues
Major themes in Aurora Levins Morales’s work: identity as a
female minority in the U.S.; feminism; multiple identity
(Puerto Rican, Jewish, North American), also inherited versus
self-defined identities; concept of immigrant; Jewish culture
and traditions; mother/daughter relationships; importance of
language, reading, words, and writing; remembering and
memory as a vehicle to surpass sense of fragmentation and
exile/displace-ment; images of spaces and cities;
“internationalist” politics.
Heterogeneous forms and texts constitute Levins Morales’s
writings. Getting Home Alive is a collage of poems, short
stories, lyrical prose pieces, essays, and dialogues. Note the
importance of eclectic style: She is lyrical, subdued at times,
sensorial, and quite visual in her imagery. She does not belong
to any major literary movement; her writings cannot be easily
categorized into one style or another, though they definitely
respond to the preoccupations of other U.S. women of color.
Fruitful comparisons can be drawn to the works of other
women of color, such as Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War
Years in Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, eds. Gómez, Moraga,
Romo-Carmona (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983).
Levins Morales has been particularly influenced by Alice
Walker. In addition, I believe comparisons and contrasts with
mainstream U.S. feminist writers would also prove valuable.
1. Study questions would deal with textural
analysis and with clarifying references to Spanish
words, places in Puerto Rico or El Barrio, and other
allusions that might not be clear to students.
2. (a) Have students do their own version of “Child of the
Americas” in order to look into their own inheritance
and cross-cultural identities.
(b) Paper topics might include the importance of
multiple identity and “internationalist” politics;
comparison and contrast of mother’s and daughter’s
experiences, points of view, language, and style;
meaning of language, reading, and writing for
Levins Morales; an analysis of images of space,
borders, urban centers, mobility, exile, displacement;
contrast to Nuyorican writers from El Barrio: How
would Levins Morales diverge from this movement,
and why should she still be considered as
representative of Puerto Rican writers in the United
States?
Bibliography
Benmayor, Rina. “Crossing Borders: The Politics of Multiple
Identity.”
Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Bulletin
2:3 (Spring 1988):
71–77.
Rojas, Lourdes. “Latinas at the Crossroads: An Affirmation of
Life in
Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales’s
Getting Home Alive.”
In Breaking Boundaries:
Latina Writing and Critical Reading, edited
by A.
Horno-Delgado, E. Ortega, N. Scott, and N. SaportaSternbach.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1989, 166–77.
Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954)
Contributing Editor: Lora Romero
Students generally find reading Cisneros a delightful
experience. The brevity and humor of her stories help make
them accessible even to those unfamiliar with the MexicanAmerican culture in which much of her writing is set. In fact,
one of my colleagues taught Cisneros very successfully to
students in Galway, Ireland.
One potential source of discomfort for students is
Cisneros’s mani-festly feminist sensibility. Some students may
accuse her (as they would accuse virtually any other feminist
writer) of “man-bashing.” When this issue comes up, I point
out that, ironically, defining feminism in that way makes men
the center of attention. Then I encourage students to talk about
what they think feminism means and/or should mean.
Sometimes students with more sophisticated definitions of
feminism can convince their peers that feminism does not
reduce to man-hating; in any case, giving students a forum for
talking through the issue is usually productive since it is one
about which they will probably have strong (if unexamined
and unarticulated) opinions.
The feminism of women of color, however, is
complicated by ethnic identification. Some students will be
assuming that ethnic authors should offer only “positive”
images of minorities—which means, in effect, talking about
sexism in minority communities is off-limits. I encourage
students to interrogate their assumptions about ethnic authors’
“duties.” At the same time, I acknowledge that being both a
woman of color and a feminist can be a difficult task since one
of the stereotypes of Latino men (and nonwhite men generally)
is that “they treat their women badly.” Then I try to turn
students’ attention back to the text to see if they can find
evidence that some tension between ethnic and gender identity
is shaping the narrative.
Issues
Students may bring to Cisneros’s work a conception of
immigrant culture that is based on the model of European
immigration to the United States. That model is not entirely
appropriate; in fact, Chicanos have a saying: “We didn’t come
to the United States. It came to us.” Before the MexicanAmerican War (1846–48), most of what is now the
southwestern United States (including Texas and California)
was part of Mexico. After the war, many erstwhile Mexicans
automatically became U.S. citizens when it annexed the land
where Mexicans had lived since the sixteenth century.
Reminding students that national boundaries are often
arbitrarily imposed should help deepen their understanding of
national culture. In addition, most students will have only
linear and unidirectional models of “assimilation” for
understanding ethnic cultures, but the culture of Latinos living
in the U.S. has been shaped by a very different historical
experience. Anthropologists and historians have argued that
the southwestern United States is really part of a much older,
regional culture that includes Northern Mexico, and that this
regional culture is constantly being reinvigorated by a
continuous flow of population back and forth over the border.
One important theme in Cisneros’s work is the
heterogeneity of the Mexican-American community (as it is
expressed through differences of class, gender, education,
language use, politics, and so on). Cisneros is, typically, more
interested in detailing the dynamics of her own community
rather than representing conflicts between Anglo Americans
and Mexican Americans. Conflicts between Anglo and Latino
cultures are, of course, present in Cisneros’s writing, but they
often take the form of encounters between relatively
assimilated Latinos and relatively unassimilated ones.
The shape of such encounters undoubtedly reflects
personal issues in the sense that Cisneros, as an educated,
middle-class intellectual, seems simultaneously committed to
identifying with her Mexican-American characters and to
never losing sight of her difference from them. Often in her
stories, there is a narrator or character who seems to represent
Cisneros herself: a Chicana artist who has done something to
scandalize her community, who exists (as it were) on the
border between Mexican-American and Anglo-American
cultures, and who has an uneasy relation to both.
Cisneros’s stories typically move in the direction of
reconciliation of the Chicana intellectual with the MexicanAmerican community, but not all of her stories achieve that
resolution. Cisneros’s work thus provides fertile grounds for
discussion of the politics of narrative closure. For this reason,
it would be helpful if, before reading Cisneros, students had
some sense of the conventions of the short story. Cisneros
writes in a modernist narrative mode with both North
American and Latin American precursors. Her stories do not
typically center on a single consciousness or point of view;
they are often populated by voices rather that characters; if
there is an identifiable narrator, she is usually ironized.
In a more advanced class where you can assume some
familiarity with a modernist narrative, you could use Cisneros
as a test case for differentiating between modernism and
postmodernism. In addition to formal considerations, some
topics crucial to such discussion would include Cisneros’s
feminism, her ethnic identification, and her attitude toward
mass culture.
To encourage students to think about how ethnic feminist
writers negotiate between their gender and their ethnic
identifications, it would be worthwhile to compare Cisneros to
writers like Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise
Erdrich, and Helena María Viramontes. On the other hand,
reading Cisneros in the context of contemporary Latin
American women writers (for example, Claire Lipesector,
Isabel Allende, Carolina María de Jesus) would put pressure
on received categories of national/cultural identity. Including
even one Latin American writer at the end of a course on what
is called “American Literature” can be a useful way of getting
students to think about the ethnocentrism of the term and the
politics of cultural study more generally.
For contrast as much as comparison, Cisneros might also
be placed in the context of nonfiction writings by lesbian
Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. The
comparison/contrast helps bring atten-tion to the specifically
heterosexual nature of Cisneros’s feminism: How does the fact
that Cisneros is heterosexual (and hence unable to declare
herself simply “independent” of men) shape her articulation of
feminism and illuminate the particular erotic dilemmas faced
by her female characters? In order to highlight the question of
class, pairing Cisneros with Tomás Rivera works well
because—although Cisneros has certain stylistic affinities with
Rivera—his work is more obviously compatible with the
version of Chicano identity constructed by the Chicano
movement.
Bibliography
Cisneros’s House on Mango Street has already generated a
number of critical responses, including: Ellen McCracken,
“Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street: CommunityOriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal
Violence” in Asunción Horno-Delgado et al. (eds.), Breaking
Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings (1989);
Julián Olivares, “Sandra Cisneros’ ‘The House on Mango
Street’ and the Poetics of Space” in María Hererra-Sobek and
Helena María Viramontes (eds.), Chicana Creativity and
Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature
(1988); Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of
Difference (1990); and Alvina E. Quintana, Home Girls:
Chicano Literary Voices (1996). There is also a growing body
of work on Woman Hollering Creek. Particularly interesting
studies of language, identity, and authenticity can be found in
Katherine Rios, “ ‘And you know what I have to say isn’t
always pleasant’: Translating the Unspoken Word in Cisneros’
Woman Hollering Creek” in María Hererra-Sobek and Helena
María Viramontes, eds., Chicana (W)rites on Word and Film
(1995); Jean Wyatt, “On Not Being La Malinche: Border
Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a
Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’ ” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature, 14 (Fall 1995); and Harry-ette Mullen, “
‘A Silence between Us Like a Language’: The
Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman
Hollering Creek,” MELUS 21 (Summer 1996). One study of
Woman Hollering Creek in the context of inter-American
feminism is Sonia Saldívar-Hulls “Feminism on the Border:
From Gender Politics to Geopolitics” in Héctor Calderón and
José David Saldívar (eds.), Criticism in the Borderlands:
Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991).
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna) (b. 1948)
Contributing Editor: Norma C. Wilson
When I first began to read Silko’s poetry and fiction, I
attempted to use the critical methods I had used in my prior
study of European and American literature. I sought primary
sources of the traditional stories that appeared in her work. But
I soon found that very little of the traditional literature of the
Lagunas had been recorded in writing. I realized that I needed
to know more of the background—cultural and historical—of
Silko’s writing.
In the spring of 1977, I arranged to meet with Silko at
the University of New Mexico. She explained to me that her
writing had evolved from an outlook she had developed as a
result of hearing the old stories and songs all her life. She also
led me to a number of helpful written sources, including
Bertha P. Dutton and Miriam A. Marmon’s The Laguna
Calendar (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1936) and the transcript of an interview with Mrs. Walter K.
Marmon in the Special Collections Department of the
Zimmerman Library, U.N.M. Another source I’ve found
helpful is Leslie A. White, “The Acoma Indians” (Fortyseventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932).
Leslie Silko’s Yellow Woman and a Body of the Spirit: Essays
on Native American Life Today (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996) provides invaluable insights about the beliefs,
oral traditions, and history of the Laguna pueblo and details
Silko’s own life experiences.
One can use the videotape, Running on the Edge of the
Rainbow, produced by Larry Evers at the University of
Arizona, Tucson. A more recent video, Leslie Marmon Silko
(produced by Matteo Bellinelli and published by Films for the
Humanities in Princeton, New Jersey, 1995), can also be
useful. I often begin looking at Silko’s writing by using a
transparency of her poem “Prayer to the Pacific.” Students
frequently come to think in new ways about their relationships
to nature and about the exploitation of Native American people
and the natural earth. They ask such questions as, “Did the
government really do that to the Navajos?”
Issues
In teaching “Lullaby,” the idea of harmony is essential—the
Navajo woman is balanced because she is aware of her relation
to the natural world, that she is a part of it and that is the most
important relationship. This allows her to nurture as the earth
nurtures. One should emphasize forced changes in the Navajo
way of life that have resulted from the encroachment of
industry and the government on Navajo land. Today the
struggle centering on Big Mountain would be a good focus. Of
course, alcoholism and the splitting up of Indian families
would be other important issues to focus on.
It is important to note that Silko’s fiction is a blending of
traditional with modern elements. And just as “Lullaby” ends
with a song, many of Silko’s other works are also a blend of
prose and poetry.
Original Audience
“Lullaby” seems to be a story from out of the 1950s. We talk
about the U.S. government’s relocation policy during that
decade. Relocation was an attempt to remove Indians from
reservations and relocate them in urban environments. We also
discuss the long history of the U.S. government removing
Indian children from their families and culture. Recently this
kind of removal has been somewhat reversed by the Indian
Child Welfare Act, which gives the tribes authority over the
placement of the children enrolled in these tribes.
One might compare and contrast Silko’s work with that of
Simon J. Ortiz. One might also consider comparing and
contrasting it with the work of James Wright, Gary Snyder,
and Louise Erdrich.
One might ask the students to look up specific places
mentioned in the story on a map—Cebolleta Creek, Long
Mesa, Cañoncito, etc.
1. Discuss the importance of the oral tradition in Silko’s
writing.
2. Discuss the structure of Silko’s fiction. Is it linear or
cyclic?
3. What is the image of woman in Silko’s fiction?
Compare or contrast this with the images of women in
the broader context of American society and culture.
4. What criticisms of American society are implicit in
Silko’s fiction?
5. What Navajo cultural values are evident in the story
“Lullaby”?
Bibliography
Allen, Paula Gunn. “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie
Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony.” American Indian
Quarterly (Fall 1990): 379–86.
Fisher, Dexter. “Stories and Their Tellers—A Conversation
with Leslie
Marmon Silko.” In The Third Woman:
Minority Women Writers of
the United States.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Wilson, Norma C. “Ceremony: from Alienation to
Reciprocity,” in Teaching
American Ethnic
Literatures, ed. David Peck and John Maitino.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (1996): 69–
82.
Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) (b. 1941)
Contributing Editor: Andrew O. Wiget
The principal problem with Ortiz’s poetry from a student
perspective is that it is so intensely political and that it takes a
political view of past events. Students can be reactionary and
feel that what is past is past, and that there has been too much
of a tendency to cast aspersions upon America’s reputation in
recent years. This jingoism is often accompanied by a belief
that poetry should not be political, but rather should concern
itself with eternal truths. These are not problems that are
associated with Ortiz’s poetry exclusively, of course, but are
part of the naive vision of poetry that teachers of literature
struggle to overcome.
I think it’s very important to begin this poem with a
reflection upon the historical experiences of Native
Americans. Begin with the historical epi-graph describing the
Sand Creek Massacre of Black Kettle’s band which gives this
poem sequence its name. That particular massacre is very well
documented and students should spend some time trying to
understand the forces that came together to create that
massacre: Colonel Chivington’s own political ambitions; his
ability to mobilize the fears and anxieties of the frontier
Colorado communities; his success at taking advantage of the
militarization of the frontier during the Civil War; the
remoteness of Chivington’s forces from federal supervision;
and the nonresistance of the Indians.
A second important issue to be discussed is how well we
all use key events in the past to give us a sense of what our
history is, emphasizing that the historical memory of people is
selective and formed for very contemporary reasons.
I think that there are certain key lines in the poetry that
are worth looking at in some detail. In addition, I ask students
to look at the relationships between the epigraphs and the
poems, how each speaks to the other. Finally, I ask students
how these poems as a group, framed as they are by the
boldfaced short poems about America, and prefaced by the
historical statement concerning the Sand Creek Massacre, all
work together to create a unified statement.
The poems move between some very concrete historical
references (on the one hand) such as those to Cotton Mather,
Kit Carson, and Saigon, and (on the other hand) to some
highly surrealistic imagery and abstract language. Students
frequently have difficulty bringing the two together, and it’s
helpful to explore some of Ortiz’s more provocative
statements as a way of creating the matrix of values from
which the poetry emerges.
Issues
The major theme of Ortiz’s poem sequence is that EuroAmericans were as much victims of their own ambitions and
blindness as were Native Americans, and the recognition by
Euro-Americans that they have victimized themselves is the
first step toward the beginning of a healing of America that
will be based on a common appreciation of our shared
responsibility for her future.
Certainly the principal formal question will be the
juxtaposition of the epigraphs, with their blunt ideological
focus, and the poems, with their convoluted syntax and high
rhetoric. It would be important to remind students, I think, that
Ortiz’s cycle of poems about the American historical
experience is only one example in a long history of poetry
about the American historical experience that stretches back
through Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Walt Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass to early national poems such as Joel Barlow’s The
Columbiad.
Original Audience
I don’t think the original audience for this poetry is
significantly different from the student audience, except
perhaps in their political orientation (the students may be more
conservative). These poems were written at the end of the
seventies and represent in some sense a considered reflection
upon the traumatization of the American psyche by the
domestic turmoil of the 1960s, the loss of confidence evoked
by Watergate, and crisis of conscience provoked by the
Vietnam War. Many of the younger students who will be
reading these poems for the first time remember none of those
events.
Certainly I think Whitman, whom Ortiz does admire greatly,
can be invoked. Ortiz tries to cultivate a prophetic voice and a
historical vision similar to Whitman’s. I think he may also be
effectively contrasted with many writers for whom a historical
criticism of America’s past terminates in an attitude of despair.
Ortiz has transformed anger into hope through compassion.
I would look at the first poem and ask students what is meant
by the juxtaposition of the lines “No waste land,/No
forgiveness.” Or have students look at the third poem, which
may be an even more provocative example, and ask them why
Ortiz believes he should have stolen the sweater from the
Salvation Army store, and why, in the end, he didn’t.
Bibliography
Ortiz, Simon. “The Story Never Ends: An Interview with
Simon Ortiz.” In
Joseph Bruchoc, Survival This Way:
Interviews with American Indian
Poets.
Tucson: University of Arizona, 1987, 211–30.
———. “Sending a Voice: The Emergence of Contemporary
Native
American Poetry.” College English 46 (1984):
598–609.
Wiget, Andrew. “Contemporary Poetry.” Native American
Literature.
Boston: Twayne, 1985.
———. Simon Ortiz. Boise State University Western Writers
Series,
Number 74. Boise: Boise State University, 1986.

Contemporary Period 1945 to the Present

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